


These Scars and How We Got Them

by Sindrandi



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: Angst and Humor, Canon-Typical Violence, Friendship/Love, Gen, The Wasteland is A Terrible Place
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2018-04-18 14:43:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 19
Words: 158,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4709756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sindrandi/pseuds/Sindrandi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Such a scattering of scars make a road-map, both to places much loved and memories best forgotten.</p><p>A girl thrust into a world made of monsters. A ghoul who may be one himself. Both searching for things they never knew they wanted. And the only way they can find them is together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Three Cheers for The New Beginnings That Destroy Us

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Music is a big part of what drives me, and I find the music I listen to has a big influence on how and what I write. So, here is my inspiration. I'll be posting what I'm listening to, so maybe you can be right in my head!
> 
>  
> 
> Without further fanfare, musical inspiration for this chapter is brought to you by:
> 
> Chord Left - Agnes Obel
> 
> Solitude - Layla Frost
> 
> Every Ending Is A New Beginning - Joep Beving

She screams as knives of hot sunlight lance through delicate optical tissues with the brightness of the bombs falling all over again. Her brains are surely melting and will leak out of her ears at any moment. Like a slow leaf in autumn, she sinks to her knees, the shock and pain of it all heavy enough to crush.

Sneaking was all but impossible; the Vault hallways too cramped and narrow to maneuver and still remain undetected. She tried, _fuck_ , did she try, but none of her good intentions were worth a thing. They kept coming, breaking against her like waves against the shore, and no amount of begging or threats made them back down.

Each successive one was easier than the last: Officer Kendall, Officer Park, Officer Wolfe, Officer Richards, Officer Mack, even Paul’s dad, Officer Hannon; all bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat like she was slugging for a homerun.

She’s disgusted with herself.

After she brained Officer Kendall, the first one, she had leaned against the wall and retched, losing the dinner Dad had made for her. Officer Kendall’s wide, blank eyes stared, disapproving and full of accusation, the blood leaking from his ears a scarlet testament to her own ruthlessness.

Why would he leave her there? Couldn’t Dad see how _wrong_ the vault was?

Adaptable and intelligent, she is more than capable of critical thinking and higher tier problem solving, but goddamn if she isn't the stupidest creature on the face of the earth.

"I forgot the fucking SUN!" she wails, pitching forward from her knees into the dirt, curling up on herself. The clear riot visor of the security helmet is meant to stop thrown objects, not the harsh solar rays tearing at the thin skin of her eyelids.

Eyes squeezed tight, she blinks rapidly in the dark safety of the cave made of her arms and panics when there is only a searing white.

While the logic and reasoning centers of her brain know that this is a simple case of intense photosensitivity, the fight or flight mechanism has kicked into high gear: neurotransmitters latching onto receptors at a shocking rate of speed - shoving all reason out a figurative six-story window.

Anatomically correct visions of being eaten alive by wild animals as she sits in a helpless, unseeing heap sucker-punches her psyche and kicks it in the teeth for good measure. Brain overloaded and synapses misfiring, she passes out cold.

 

*********

 

The dusty wasteland breeze whistles and teases along her ears and cheeks. Mercifully, it is sundown as her consciousness crawls up out of the sludge of its forced reset. Gingerly sitting up, she automatically checks for injuries. _Just like dear old Dad,_ she muses, and while her eyes are gritty and her head still hurts, it isn’t nearly as bad as that first awful meeting with the sun. Then she sees something that is a stern reminder that she has stumbled into a whole other world.

The sky appears to be on fire.

Clamoring up to the top of the rocky outcropping, she looks out to the west and what she sees takes her breath away. The sun's rays are no longer harsh, but soft and diffused as it sets. Pinks, purples, oranges, and reds paint the sky and she can only stare in awe. The sheer expanse of sky overhead is terrifying, but for now, the brilliant colors of sunset hold just enough novelty to push away the agoraphobic fear. Legs tucked up underneath and hands in her lap, she gazes out at the sunset and thinks about absolutely nothing but the colors until it finally sinks below the horizon.

Hot day turns to chilly night and she shivers. While staying here is tempting, it would likely spell death.

Pack shouldered and Pip-Boy map consulted, she carefully heads toward Megaton, baseball bat in hand and 10mm pistol strapped to one hip. The little handgun is not her favorite. It fits awkwardly in her hands and she isn't sure at all how to shoot it. At least the BB gun had been straightforward - eye lined right up along the sight, cheek resting on the smooth wood stock. Breathe in, find the target, breathe out, squeeze don’t pull, be surprised by the shot. Dad had taught her everything, even how to take it apart and put it back together again. Guns, however, are not in her thoughts at the moment. Her surroundings command more attention.

The whole world is obviously ruined, not that she had known what it looked like before the bombs dropped, but she’s pretty sure it isn’t supposed to look like this. There’s almost nothing left. Black spires of atomically petrified trees, burned out cars, broken highway; it looks like everything had been blown sky high and left to fall wherever gravity might deign to put it.

Heading down the hill, a town - or what is left of one anyway - looms out of the growing dark, complete with crumbling buildings, some with mailboxes out front. Unsure if the buildings are inhabited, she drops into a crouch. A soft chime from the Pip-Boy announces her arrival in ‘Springvale,’ but its Foe-Finder feature also shows a friendly green dot, indicating that she is not alone.

An eyeball-shaped robot floats serenely down what used to be a street. It is apparently a flying radio. Someone named ‘John Henry Eden’ insists that he is the president and tells her that the ‘Enclave’ would ‘restore every school’, ‘reinstate every youth program’, and offer ‘financial assistance to those in need’.

She calls so much bullshit, a whole herd of cows couldn’t make enough to keep up. There can’t possibly be anyone in charge of this hellhole, and if there is, they’re doing a pretty crap job.

Fearing retaliation if she swats it out of the sky with the baseball bat, she decides to let bygones be bygones and scram. Keeping off the street and combing the ruined buildings for anything useful proves surprisingly easy. The structures have walls like swiss cheese, and there are no doors to knock on.

The ruined homes provide a few goodies for those with sharp eyes and quick fingers. A few trade magazines in ruined mailboxes, random junk, and an intriguing safe that she jimmies open with a bobby pin, a little coaxing, and a far flung prayer. Lock picking isn’t her forte, but surprisingly, Amata, of all people, had a knack for it that was almost preternatural, and had thankfully shared some knowledge.

The little safe holds a few boxes of food, a crappy-looking pistol, a type of ammunition that looks too big for the 10mm, and some chems. Dandy Boy Apples, (apples, while not in this strange, dried form, are her favorite) are reverently packed away, and three more green dots pop up on the Pip-Boy screen, moving steadily down the street.

If the dots threw her for a loop, the people and creature belonging to said dots toss her completely.

Out of the evening gloom walks a scary looking man in dark armor with a wicked looking rifle. The second man is wearing slacks, suit jacket, and tie, dressed like he’s going to meet his swell girl for a picnic in the park, like in the entertainment tapes.

The giant cow moos out of one of its two heads.

“What. The. Actual. Fuck,” she tries to say, but no sound is coming out.

“Hello, Miss!” the man in the suit calls out, waving in a decidedly friendly way, but he is also armed with a decidedly oily smile.

Gripping the bat a little tighter, her glance darts between the oil-slick grin and the guard’s gun. The rifle is still stowed away behind his back, but that could change in less than a moment if he chose. Getting twitchy will be unwise, but just standing there like a dope may also be a bad idea.

“Hello,” she croaks out.

“I am Doctor Hoff, physician and healer. This is my security consultant, Mr. Tango," the man in black snaps off a lazy salute that belies his watchfulness, "and this fine beast of burden is Atlas." The cow, using all four eyes, fixes her with a disinterested stare, chewing its cud (cuds?) with both mouths.

"Can I interest you in some of my merchandise, dear girl?” His smile is positively greasy now.

The act of buying things is a somewhat foreign concept. There were no stores in the Vault. Food came from the extruder, water from the purifier. Everything was provided for free, so there was nothing to buy in the first place. Trading is only slightly more familiar, but that was comic books for rubber band guns, snack cakes for bubblegum, and marbles for bobby pins.

What she really wants to talk about was how a cow can have two heads and still be alive, but decides it would be prudent to save that conversation for another time.

“Um, sure? What are you selling?”

“I am a purveyor of fine medicinals! I offer quality pick-you-ups, put-you-downs, and some that turn you all around!"

Chems.

Those little miracles of modern molecular science could get you hooked quick and didn’t really do much for you, except Rad-Away and stimpaks. Ellen DeLoria was a shining example of substance abuse, something not to be emulated. Butch's mom had been so toasted, she pretty much just let the radroaches nibble on her.

“I would not be interested in your more, ah, recreational supplies, but I would like to see your medical selection, if you would be so kind.” Manners may be of use here; he seems fairly intelligent and well spoken. He is a merchant, after all.

His smile grows bigger, and happily, a little kinder. “It is so nice to meet a polite individual here in this wild, untamed Wasteland! I understand your hesitation completely, Miss. Rest assured, I have a lovely stock of stimpaks, among other life-giving concoctions.”

A good rummage through his inventory reveals five stimpaks and three Rad-Away bags. The unfamiliar bags are filled with a syrupy-looking liquid in a sickly amber color that makes her think of bile.

“I’ll take these, please. What will the total be?” She confidently pulls out the stacks of green bills nicked from a dresser, like people did in the tapes when they went to a store. He dissolves into a gale of high-pitched giggles.

Someone has obviously been sampling the merchandise.

“Oh, my dear! Oh my dear girl!” he snorts as he manfully tries to get his giggles under control. “I’m not sure where you’re from, but that money is only fit for starting fires out here! Do you have caps? Something to trade, perhaps?”

“Caps? Like this hat?” The baseball hat on her head is worn and the red fabric has faded a little, but judging by the state of the world, it’s probably prime.

“Well, while I would be more than pleased to buy such a fine article of clothing, the caps I speak of are bottlecaps.”

She can only stare in what she hopes is not, but probably is, an expression of complete bewilderment.

“From the tops of Nuka-Cola, the sweet and fizzy refreshment?” He cocks his head and looks at her strangely.

“Oh, of course.” This world seems to hold an infinite amount of ridiculous. “Well, I don’t seem to have any caps on me, but I would love to trade.” Pulling all the random junk out of her pack, the odds and ends form a small mountain between them.

“That will do admirably, especially if all of your items are in as good condition as this lovely hat. While I myself specialize in pharmaceuticals, many of my colleagues, like the venerable Crazy Wolfgang, prefer a more, ah," he points to a coffee mug, "varied inventory. I would be unkind not to keep an eye out for certain treasures he may find appealing.”

'Crazy Wolfgang,' now _that’s_ a name that sounds like it belongs in this godforsaken pile of dust.

After a few snickers from the guard at her motley inventory and Doc Hoff’s exclamations of surprise at the sheer number of spare Vault security armor sets, she walks away with the stimpaks and Rad-Away, along with a little over 100 'caps'. Not completely sure where to store them, she stuffs them in a spare sock and ties the end to her belt. Its cheery jangle is oddly comforting.

The good doctor waves a friendly goodbye, and she waves back and shakes out her hair. She can’t believe of all the junk she nicked from the Vault, she didn’t remember a single hair tie. Jamming it all in her helmet, she sets off for Megaton, determined to get there before morning. She is not eager to see what her eyes will have to say about the sunrise.

 

 

* * *

 

Stockholm slowly thumbs off the safety, watching intently through the old four-power scope, muttering a curse as he notices yet another scratch in the lens.

This gun is irritating, a shitty .32 hunting rifle, but he supposes he's good enough to snipe with anything they give him. He just wishes they would have sprung for something with a little more stopping power. Or maybe something not held together with wire, duct tape, and a prayer.

That would be nice.

While she doesn't _look_ like a raider, she also looks like no one he's ever seen before.

She's dressed in a dark blue jumpsuit with some sort of light armor over top. The ensemble manages to look both utilitarian and sexy; utilitarian due to the armor, and sexy with the way it's hugging all the curves of its distinctly female wearer.

Also, Stockholm hasn’t come down from his perch in a while, so maybe anything containing purely X chromosomes and all its skin is starting to look sexy.

The strange round helmet is too big, wobbling all over her head like a nut in a too-loose shell, but it’s stubbornly strapped under her chin. She's holding a baseball bat with a death grip in one hand, while the other rests lightly on a little handgun strapped to her left hip.

Stockholm isn't sure whether to shoot her or ask her out for a drink.

While she looks too small to be dangerous, he is concerned with her movements. She creeps along, staying in the deepest shadow the night will provide, but her furtive glances, darting here, there, and everywhere, speak of fear and caution rather than nefarious intentions. He doesn’t understand why she would be so fearful here. Most people visibly relax the closer to the gate they get. He figures she must be lost.

He exhales and thumbs the safety back on.

"Hi there, chickadee!" he calls out as she slips around the stupid hunk-of-junk robot that insists on constantly walking into his shots. Someday, one of Stockholm’s rounds would go wide, and nail Deputy Weld right in his bucket-of-bolts brain basket with a glorious explosion of motor oil and sparking electronics. Boss man Simms would be pissed, but Stockholm would just blame it on the crap rifle they gave him.

Her head snaps up to his perch and he loses his breath. The moonlight glints off her eyes through the visor and for a moment, they look like they’re made of crystal. Not that he’s ever seen a real crystal, but he’s heard about them. Somehow, he finds his voice again. "Usually, when someone says hi to you, you say something back, like, 'Hello,' or 'Good evening', or 'Greetings and salutations, Mr. Stockholm, lovely weather we're having'."

She squints up at him, crinkling her brows together in a thinking frown, and the illusion is lost.

"Hi," she says over her shoulder, pushing the gate open and slinking away. 

 

* * *

 

Pushing open the door of Moriarty’s Saloon, she is greeted by the combined scents of sweat, piss, and desperation. The first thing she sees nearly makes her turn and run to the Vault and pound on the door to get back in.

There is a man-shaped creature behind the bar, calmly wiping glasses, like it’s a normal, everyday thing to be missing half its skin. The nose and ears are gone and startlingly red muscle peeks out between the tattered skin like a clinical anatomy model. It looks at her expectantly with opaque, milky eyes.

“Welcome to Moriarty’s.”


	2. Of Tired and Broken Things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration brought to you by:
> 
> See In You - The Album Leaf
> 
> Saturday Morning - Joep Beving

The metal door opens with a swirl of warm night air and the smell of dust; a little smoothskin walks in and takes off her odd helmet. A mop of dark curly hair practically explodes and tumbles everywhere as the helmet comes off. Her eyes sweep the room and land on him, immediately going round as saucers. She’s brave though, he’ll give her that. She schools her expression into something a little more presentable with all the effort of mastering a mad brahmin.

She doesn’t appear disgusted, exactly, but emotions are flitting across her face as quick as humanly possible. He catches glimpses of fright, fascination, and then oddly, concern.

With a deep breath, she pulls herself together and hitches on the shoulder straps of her pack, like she’s getting ready to go on a long journey.

Approaching a corpse would count as a long journey, he thinks.

That creepy Mr. Burke seems determined to get her attention, and is waving his arms like a lunatic. When that fails, he actually snaps his fingers and whistles at her, like a dog. She stops and turns slowly, fixing him with a glare that would have peeled paint. She stalks past him like he doesn’t exist. 

Gob is liking this smoothskin already.

Sidling up to the bar, she plops down on a barstool and gives Gob an honest to goodness grin. She opens her mouth to talk to him, but is interrupted.

“Hey, baby. You’re cute, and I’m Jericho. Wanna screw?”

So much for subtlety. Gob stifles a laugh when the girl cheerfully tells him he can ‘fuck right off and sideways,’ like she’s talking to him about the weather.

Jericho, too drunk to be mad, lets out a startled laugh and mutters something about ‘fucking rat bastard kids these days.’ She’s lucky he’s on the right side of smashed or he would have beat her into the ground.

She turns back to Gob with that thousand watt smile.

He can’t remember the last time someone actually smiled at him besides Nova and Moira Brown. Neither of them really counted though. Nova has been strung out on Jet for three years and Moira is a cheese slice short of a sandwich. 

They both smile all the time like a perfect pair of dipshits, and it doesn’t mean a thing. This girl smiles a real smile, and while it makes him nervous, he can’t help that stupid warm feeling from spreading in the center of his chest.

“So, I don’t want to be rude," the girl says confidentially, swinging her too-short legs under the bar like a living metronome, "so don’t answer this if you don’t want to, but what happened to you? Is there anything I can do to help?”

He relaxes. She means him no harm, too ignorant to be an immediate threat. He thinks he can probably talk to her without getting hit. “You been living under a rock, smoothskin? I’m a ghoul.”

She seems to take that and roll it around a little. “Hmm. Ghoul.”

“What, you never seen a ghoul before?”

Gobtholomew has been stuck in this hellhole of a bar for fifteen years with nothing to break up the stifling boredom of his days except beatings, and the compulsive polishing of glasses. Needless to say, he notices  _ everything _ .  

He looks her up and down and the pieces start to fall into place. The unscarred skin and shiny hair have never seen lack of clean water, a healthy roundness in the small face that is ignorant of hunger, the clear whites of her eyes a stranger to disease, while the irises snap with an intelligence that comes from an actual education.

Vault kid. 

It had been a long while since he’d seen one of those, but lately, they seemed to be escaping their little warrens with the frequency of rats fleeing a sinking ship. When one did manage to stumble into town, well, they just weren’t quite  _ right _ . It wasn’t easily recognizable of course, but they were just different - flighty and nervous.

And crazy.

One he met talked to himself constantly and couldn’t stand being outside during the day. Said the sky was too big and heavy and was sure it would crush him. He had wandered out into the Wastes one night and just never came back. What was his name? Something commonplace and forgettable. George? Glen? Gary maybe?

Her face is scrunched up, looking at him like she’s trying to solve a difficult puzzle. “No. I assume it has something to do with radiation?”

“Got it in one. Took too much radiation, and here I am. Now what do you want to drink?”

"I'll have a Nuka-Cola, maybe?”

“Good choice.” He looks over his shoulder and doesn’t see Moriarty. “I like you, so I'll tell you this up front," he murmurs, just loud enough for her to hear. "Don’t drink anything in here that isn’t already sealed.”

"Why? Something bad in it?"

Gob nods seriously as he pops off the cap. “It sure as hell isn't good. You're lucky you got me instead of Moriarty. Real lucky.”

“Thanks,” she mumbles, sniffing the cola suspiciously. 

“What, you’ve never had one?”

“No, Dad said it’ll rot your teeth, but I’ve heard it’s good. It is, right?”

“Try it and find out, Lucky. Don’t forget the cap.”

She grins at his nickname for her. “Lucky. I guess I kind of am. I'm alive, right?” She pockets the cap and takes a sip. Her eyes get round and a look of pleasant surprise passes across her features.

“It’s...spicy?” She sticks her tongue out and tries to look at it with crossed eyes.

Gob actually laughs at this and it sounds so foreign and strange to his own ears he has an inexplicable urge to clap his hands over his mouth.

"Not spicy, smoothskin, that's just the carbonation."

"Well," she says, peering into the bottle and back to his face, "I think I like it."

Three Nuka-Colas and a two hours later, Lucky has been educated in most things Wastelandia and Megatonese. She tells him about the vault and her dad going missing. 

He wants to tell her he saw him a day or two ago, but Gob is a fucking coward. 

He hates himself for being such a spineless piece of shit. Fifteen years of constant abuse has beat him down so far, he's not sure he could ever get up again. Another fifteen, and he would probably go feral. Maybe it would be a blessing, to stop caring and just fade away. He simultaneously shivers and smiles at the thought of a freshly feral Gob chewing on Moriarty’s arm.

Gob skips the part about her dad and tells her about Moriarty instead, about Nova, and how he ended up in the saloon. 

“You really can’t leave? What’s keeping you from telling him…”

“What, to “fuck right off and sideways?” he interrupts with a snort, an impressive feat for someone missing the soft tissue of their nose. “You’ve got a mouth on you, Lucky.”

She ducks her head and looks sheepish, of all things. “Kids are scared when you’re smarter than them, and it makes them mean. You’ve got to be mean right back."

Gob sighs. If only he could be 'mean right back'. He’s had detailed fantasies of killing Colin Moriarty every day for over a decade. “I’d give anything to leave, but he’d rather kill me than let me go. Besides, I'm a ghoul, not a human. No one's going to stop and help a walking corpse."

Her brows draw together as she frowns. 

"That's stupid. Your DNA might have a few more loopty-loops now, but how are you not human in the ways that count? You're bipedal," she says, ticking her points off on slender fingers, "you walk, talk, reason, feel, and remember like a human." She waves her hands as she gets more excited. "Think of it this way, you thrive in a distinctly radioactive environment. If anything, it's "smoothskins" who are inferior, biologically speaking."

He whistles through his teeth, impressed. "You’re smart. Doesn't change a thing though."

“Well, I’ll think of something,” she says with a calculating look on her face.

“You do that, but I won’t wait up for you.”

“What about other ghouls? Are there many others like you?”

He explains all about Underworld, marks it on her little computer, and tells her about Carol.

“If you get out that way, tell her I say hi. I sure do miss her,” he says, and thinking of Carol makes his heart twist into a knot that will never really untangle.

"Shouldn't wish for things you can't have,  _ boy-o _ .” Gob cringes as he hears the Irish brogue much too close behind him. Moriarty claps him on the shoulder, hard. 

There will be a beating tonight, in the dark, when the customers have all gone home. Nova will be upstairs, hopefully sleeping, and Gob will keep quiet so as not to wake her. She doesn't get nearly enough sleep these days. He'll have to clean up the drops of his own blood from the floor before morning. 

Somehow, though, having a normal conversation with a real person might be worth it. 

"Now, little one, drink your drink and don't bother the help. You don't have to listen when the zombie yaps, you know," Moriarty says with a wink.

Her brows furrow at the word "zombie", but just as quickly the look is replaced by a sweet smile. Gob can see it is the type of smile that’s soft on one side, but sharp on the other.

"Oh, I don't know, I find him to be fascinating."

"Well, it's best if you find your drink or Nova's tits more fascinating. Now, shut up, drink up, and get out," Moriarty growls, patience wearing thin.

"Oh, now, I didn't mean any harm, just interested in anyone new. Tell me about your bar and this Nova. She sounds so nice, I just may want to rent a room for the night." 

Gob wants to laugh at both of them, her for trying to play Moriarty, and Moriarty thinking he could play her. It’s like watching a game of cat and mouse; one with two cats and no mouse at all.

Moriarty stares at her a moment, but greed wins out. 

"Of course, little one! You'd be hard pressed to find better company in all the Wastes. Now, it's almost closing time. Except Nova, she's always open."

Lucky giggles politely at his joke, but a bit of something hard flashes in her eyes.

"Before I do, I have a few questions about a man that might have come through, tall, dark hair and eyes, paler than me, has one of these.” She turns her little computer over with a flick of her wrist and the dim bar lights glint off the screen. “Have you seen him?"

Moriarty smiles, an old wolf with worn down teeth. "You must be the little baby girl, all grown up! I've seen him, all right. He's already come and gone. Got what he came for and left just as fast."

"Wonderful!” She claps her hands the way a child might. “Can you tell me where he went?"

Moriarty does his best to look apologetic and fails miserably. "Ah, I could, yes, but nothing is free out here in the Wasteland, as you'll soon find. 100 caps should do the trick." He chuckles at her crestfallen face. "Fine, if you haven’t got the funds, just run a little errand for me, and perhaps we can work out an arrangement. You know, for old time’s sake."

Lucky shrugs noncommittally, but inclines her head like she’s listening.

"A woman named Silver was in my employ. Traitorous harpy stole 300 caps worth of chems from me and ran. Find her, kill her, and bring back whatever caps that junkie bitch hasn't already pissed away."

Lucky smiles the smile, smooth as glass and just as sharp, just as likely to kiss you or kill you. Moriarty is a fool for not noticing it, but caps are clouding his eyes. "I'll see what I can do," she says. "Now, I believe it's past my bedtime."

“Nova! Get your whore ass down here, you’ve got a customer!” Moriarty yells up the stairs.

Nova sashays down and her bleary eyes go wide as she takes in the little Vault dweller. 

Gob wishes Nova would look at him like that. He knows Nova is only nice to him because she's usually blitzed out of her mind, but he can't help soaking up her kind words like a thirsty earth and turning them into something they have no business being. She has never touched him, not once in the five years she had been here. Nova touches everyone else, her hand on an arm, the back of her knuckle down a cheek, her fingers playfully ruffling someone's hair, and Gob truly can't tell if it's because she actually wants to or because it's just a habit. 

“Aren’t you just pretty as a picture!” Nova says, running a finger down the back of Lucky’s hand. “Give your caps to Colin and come to bed, sugar.”

**********

The Vaultie just wants her hair combed.

Nova wishes she had another dose of Jet, even half a dose. Time moves so fucking slow without it. Her hands shake and the nausea of withdrawal is tearing at her gut. She's wearing thin, and Moriarty’s holding out on her to 'teach her a lesson.' She had asked to keep a few more of the caps she earned. He looked like he wanted to beat her, but no john wants a bruised up piece of ass, so he hit her where it hurt. Vicious bastard always knew where the soft spots were.

Nova runs the brahmin-bone comb through the shiny locks and relaxes a little with the steady, mind-numbing motion. Now she understands why Gob is always polishing the glasses. The Vaultie’s hair is soft as the tight curls slip through her fingertips and smells like something sweet. 

Nova’s jealous, but not jealous enough to stop sending a little prayer to heaven that the Wasteland won’t frizzle out the silky strands with its heat and wind like it has everyone else’s. 

Some good things on this earth should be able to stay good, right?

**********

As his face smashes into the floor and he feels the gush of blood that comes when whatever is left of his nose is broken, just like it has a hundred times before, Gob thinks of how that thousand watt smile shined in his direction and decides he was right.

It was worth it.

  
  



	3. Nausea is Nothing to Be Ashamed Of

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration brought to you by:
> 
> La Clairiere - Piano Novel
> 
> Deco - Charles Bolt
> 
> The End of All Our Exploring - Max Richter

Lucky hesitantly knocks on the door of the decrepit ranch-style home outside Springvale.

“Silver? You there?”

The door is flung open and a woman armed with a lead pipe stands in the doorway, trying to look bigger than she really is. Lucky knows that stance; she's used it before herself when Wally Mack cornered her in some dark, unfrequented hallway. Wally took after his dad, sadistic and cruel. Butch seemed like the worst of the three, but really, it was Wally who was the nastiest. Butch held a grudging respect for those who stood up after getting knocked down, but Wally was the type to keep kicking and smile while he did it.

“What do you want?” the woman shrieked. “Did Moriarty send you? You come near me and I’ll fuck you up!”

Lucky puts her hands up and uses her nurse voice - the 'do no harm, but take no shit' voice. “Hey! I’m not here to hurt you. Maybe you can tell me why he wants you dead?”

Silver slowly lowers the pipe and motions her in. They sit down at what was, before the war, a nice little kitchen table. Lucky can still trace the tiny faded flower pattern of the Formica top. Silver sighs and blows her platinum grey bangs out of her face with a quick huff, an expression both defeated and wary.

“Listen, kid. I don’t owe Moriarty anything. Those caps were what he owed me. I told him I wanted out, I even slept with the pig to seal the deal. Then he tells me next morning he changed his mind. Well, fuck that.”

Lucky smiles as a truly inspired idea pops into her head. “I’ll just tell him I killed you, and that you were piss poor when I found you.”

Silver's eyes widen like she's just seen a ghost. "You’d really do that for me? You don’t want anything in return?”

“I’m already getting information from him, so that’s payment enough.”

Silver shakes her head and smiles, handing Lucky a clinking bag. “No way, honey. You’re saving my sweet ass like a knight in shining armor.”

**********

Lucky hops up on her usual barstool, but Gob can't even look at her. She killed Silver, the only poor soul to ever make it out of this putrid pit.

"What? You mad?" Lucky asks, head cocked to the side, looking for all the world like she doesn't know why he’s upset with her.

Leaning in close, he spits out each word like a bullet so she understands. "I thought you were a good person. Different maybe." He tries to stay calm. What did he expect? This whole world is shitty, right down to the last person except Carol. His fist clenches the bar rag so tight it should have broken. "But you're just the same as everyone else."

She smiles that damn thousand watt smile, and he hates her.

"Gobbie, I knew you'd be a good friend the minute I met you."

"I'm not your friend! After what you did to Silver..."

She grins even wider. "Ooooooo!" she whispers. "Could you keep spreading that rumor?"

"Rumor?" Gob hasn't been so confused since his skin started falling off in '25.

"Yeah!" Her eyes sparkle with shenanigans. "But make up something really spectacular. You know, like, maybe I slit her throat in her sleep and fed the body to savage dogs."

"Spectacular?" he splutters.

She rolls her eyes up to the ceiling, the picture of a long suffering teacher with a particularly inept pupil. "Yes, Gob, spectacular. The deader she sounds, the safer she'll be," she whispers behind her hand.

Oh. _Ohhhhh._

"Jeez, Gob, why does everyone think I'm such a bloodthirsty bag of dicks?" she complains.

It’s because in a world this broken, she’s too good to be true.

**********

_Christ on a cracker. DC? Super mutant infested DC? Three Dog, you fucker, why did you have to hole up in the most inaccessible location on the map? You might as well live on the goddamn moon._

This thought and more tumble through her mind as she tightens a lug nut on the last leaky water pipe. Helping Walter had not only given her a few caps, but her repair skills are improving, too. How the hell she’s supposed to disarm the giant nuclear bomb sitting smack-dab in the middle of one of the most civilized towns in the Wasteland is another matter entirely. Accidentally blowing up Megaton is not an option. She'd already told Burke to fuck right off and sideways, in her own way. She smiles to herself thinking about the aftermath of her decision.

 

Curiosity had finally gotten the better of her, and she went over to see what he wanted. He was polite, and that meant she was required to reply in kind. She was indeed lucky that she had paid attention to social niceties because what he said next made her blood run cold. When the conversation quickly steered towards the bomb, she felt her eyes get wide, and hoped it only conveyed surprise at being asked to destroy an entire town, rather than disgust. She needed to be all smiles and agreements. Why yes, she did think Megaton a blight on an otherwise beautiful Earth. Of course, she would obliterate the whole settlement and everything in it. Inside, however, she was having a miniature meltdown. She had to get him to believe that she was the best person for the job. Otherwise, he would find someone else who really would blow up Megaton.

She had smiled her big smile when he mentioned caps, like they might be the most important things in the world. She tried to haggle, knowing she would probably fail, but wanted to seem as greedy as possible.

He swallowed her bait like a gluttonous fish.

Gingerly pocketing the detonator, and tossing a lazy wave as she walked outside, she ran straight to Lucas Simms. He looked _pissed_. He stormed off to Moriarty’s, eyes dark with promises of retribution and softly spoken phrases of ‘Wasteland justice.’ She trotted behind him, reminded of some old western tape; the righteous town sheriff moseying along with his new deputy to confront the mad dog of a stranger. Lucky wondered what he would do.

Burke tried to wind around the conversation, slipping this way and that, but Simms was having none of it. There was a moment where Lucky thought Burke might actually go along quietly, but there was too much humming energy underneath his face, something dangerous in the set of his shoulders. Simms turned around to lead the way out the door and Lucky almost choked at his foolishness.

She raised her pistol and shot Burke's face full of holes before he could fire the weapon he whipped out of his pocket just a fraction too slow. She was so close, she couldn't have missed in a million years.

His brains were everywhere, splattered on the wall, sitting on the chair, swimming in his glass of whiskey, plastered on her face. She barely made it to a mop bucket before she lost her already unsettling molerat lunch.

And that was how Lucky found herself the new owner of a free silenced 10mm pistol, and decided she needed to get this sissy puking thing under control. It was embarrassing. Some wastelander she would be if she puked every time she killed something.

Lucky sighs as she straightens up and walks to the water processing plant to tell Walter that another leak has been taken care of. She’s smart, practically a prodigy by Wasteland standards, but knows explosives are not her best subject. Taking apart simple locks, hacking computers, and fixing both machines and people comes easy, but atomic missiles with three metric tons of nuclear payload are out of her league. Maybe Moira will have an idea. She’s some kind of genius, right?

**********

To her credit, Moira doesn't laugh in her face.

“Oh, my goodness, no! I couldn’t do that to those nice folks at the Church of Atom! Why, then what would they have to worship? I mean, I suppose I could do it and not tell them, but that would be lying, and you can’t tell lies standing next to the sacred object of an insane cult of nuclear fission, now can you?”

**********

Lucky snaps her head back into her hiding place behind a row of shelves in the Super Duper Mart as a raider with a shockingly pink mohawk passes by.

Freaking Moira Brown and her terrible ideas. The Wasteland Survival Guide itself isn’t a bad idea, but the ‘research’ is proving hazardous. Moira had sold her an assault rifle that was in fairly good repair. It’s much like holding her BB gun, and while the kick is much more intense, Lucky feels reasonably comfortable with it. However, when she shoots it, it will be ridiculously loud, and they will all come en masse to destroy her. She can’t believe she didn’t take the 10mm. It would have been perfect for a job requiring silence.

Lucky will not make such a mistake again.

The plan is to shoot and move on. If she stays in her kill zone, they will find her and kill her in turn. Checking her weapon and taking a deep breath, she peeks around the corner again.

Right into the back of Pink Hair’s mohawk.

She panics and shoots the raider in the head at close range, which explodes like an overripe melon. Lucky turns her head away just in time as a mist of brain matter splatters the side of her helmet. She is mildly surprised she only retches a few times.

“What the fuck, Lou? You shoot somebody?” a male voice hollers to her right. Lucky has a nasty feeling that she will probably die in here, and the nausea creeps up again. Circling back around the shelving, she pays close attention to her Pip-Boy’s Foe-Finding feature. The hostile red dot is right in front of her, a few aisles away.

“Lou?” Lucky decides to take a chance. “Over here!” she yells in what she hopes is a voice someone with a pink mohawk named Lou would use.

“Ugh. Yer such a slut. Hang on.”

The VATS system makes targeting easy. She had never used or understood the function until now, but what a function it is. The staccato burst of gunfire echoes along the high ceiling, and he only gets out a strangled whimper before collapsing. Lucky decides that raiders naturally have brains the consistency of oatmeal, because every one she has met so far has been dumb as a bag of hammers. Continuing in a pattern of drawing out her enemies by making an unholy racket and then circling back around, she finds there are only the outer rooms that need clearing.

Clearing all but the last room, she rounds the corner and the smell of rotting flesh smacks her in the face like a jilted lover. Taking out the raiders in the room with patience and cunning, she waits until they turn their backs before blowing their brains out their faces. Pip-Boy devoid of red dots, the Super Duper Mart is as quiet and still as before the raiders took up residence there.

The source of the stench is a human body tied to a mattress.

It’s a female; and she had been beautiful once. She is small and slim with an elfin-featured face hidden under the bloat. Her sunken eyes are open wide and sightless, death turning them milky and opaque. She's only half dressed in a tattered settler outfit. The pants are missing and the shirt is hiked up to her shoulders to display ash grey skin marred by clotted cuts and black bruises. 

They had tortured and raped her to death, and then left her here to rot.

Something breaks inside, and Lucky lets out a howl of rage, for the girl, for herself, for the disgusting, rotten world she has been unceremoniously dumped into. Tears flood her eyes and she sinks to the ground next to the body, hugging her knees and rocking, keening in grief for the death of a person she has never even met. Lucky cries her eyes dry and finally collects herself, standing shakily, but with renewed determination.

She will not be the girl on the mattress.

A random key lets her into the pharmacy, where she swipes some meds, ammo, and an office ID, but most interesting is a Protectron, still in its docking hub.

"Hello, beautiful," she says quietly, tracing its outline reverently through the glass case with a fingertip. Such a pretty, shiny thing. Stanley’s Dean’s Electronics magazines had articles about Protectrons. She had been too scared to go up to Deputy Weld in Megaton, but this one is close enough to touch.

“Hey, we’re back! Open the goddamn… Wait, somethin’ ain’t right here.”

This 'Office Helper' should have a security setting just begging to be tested out. Fingers dancing across the keyboard, she ferrets out all the paren tricks, those little bits of code that knock out incorrect password choices and restore hack attempts. 'BASED' is not a password she would have picked, but it isn't her problem now.

_“Initializing… Security protocol activated. Hostiles detected. Valued employee, please stand back. The use of lethal force has been authorized.”_

When silence again reigns, she strips the raiders of their armor and weapons and her stomach flutters at the tacky blood on the leather. But she can't afford to leave good caps lying there. So she grins, all sharp teeth and brokenness.

Something rises up in her, so mean and sick that she doesn't even recognize herself, and it's then she knows the old her has died right alongside the girl on the mattress.


	4. Friends Are Easier Lost Than Found

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration brought to you by:
> 
> Tristan - Oskar Schuster
> 
> Into the Sea - The Album Leaf
> 
> Moon - Little People
> 
> Search and Destroy - Sanders Bohlke
> 
> Storm - Jose Gonzalez

The girl on the mattress refuses to be left at the Super Duper Mart and has decided to follow Lucky around for awhile, showing up in her dreams.

Lucky has never been one for bad dreams. Maybe because cramming her brain with information needed to be the next Vault doctor, there simply wasn’t room for them.

But now they seem to have carved out some substantial real estate.

**********

_“Why won’t you help me?” the girl says plaintively up from the sticky red mattress._

_“I'm trying!” Lucky growls, fingers fumbling at the ropes holding her down._

_“I can’t see,” the girl whimpers, and Lucky finds that one of the sunken eyes had finally given up the ghost and ruptured._

_“It's alright,” Lucky says, frantically pulling at the ropes. Her fingers are scraped and bruised and the fingernails are pulling away from their beds. Where did her knife go, anyway?_

_“You're too stupid,” the girl says irritably. “Someone better would have fixed it by now. And look what you've done to my arm!”_

_Lucky had given an extra hard tug, and there is a squelching pop. The rope is loose, but that's only because the girl’s arm has come off. Blood the color of blackened bricks sluggishly oozes from the shoulder socket and the stench of rot is enough to make Lucky go cross-eyed._

_The girl heaves a wet, sticky sigh as her chest slowly caves in._

_“You’re useless.”_

_**********_

Lucky throws herself into work. She helps shore up the walls of Megaton, goes hunting for wildlife around the perimeter, if only to keep that poor bastard Mickey alive long enough to die of thirst rather than be eaten alive by a radscorpion. She changes Deputy Weld’s oil and tweaks his programming to stay out of Stockholm’s shots.

Helping people with their problems helps keep her mind off the images of bloated rape victims and blown-out craniums that make nightly appearances in her dreams.

She likes Moira a lot. Everyone else thinks Moira is crazy, but Lucky can see she’s crazy like a fox. It’s nice to talk to someone so intelligent and swap knowledge, and working on the Survival Guide is really something she can get behind. Lucky sure would have appreciated one when she first crawled out of the Vault.

She brought a proximity mine she found in the Super Duper Mart to Moira, and with heads bent together like a couple of schoolgirls, they pick it apart just to see how it works, tittering with excitement when they discover something new.

For all the death and destruction they could deal, landmines are fascinating little pieces of engineering. What most people never see before they’re blown to bits is that the trigger plate pops down when it is armed. The plate picks up ground vibrations from nearby footsteps, triggering the detonation cascade.

The process for disarming them is stupidly simple. Flip up the plate, pull the blue wire, and presto, a previously dangerous ordnance is now harmless enough to be put in your pocket. It’s locating the mine itself without stepping on it that is difficult to master.

When the wire pulling starts, Rome, Moira's hired muscle, shakes his head and decides it would be prudent to "check the security of the perimeter."

Moira laughs and whispers, "Some bodyguard I've got, afraid of a little old mine!"

"I can hear you, you know!" Rome does his best to look offended.

"He's such a grump, too!" Moira whispers behind her hand.

"He can be as grumpy as he wants with an ass like that," Lucky stage-whispers back.

"Oh for...you two... _ugh_!" Rome splutters as he stomps out.

Lucky nudges Moira in the ribs and grins a goofy grin as Rome slams the door. "So what about him? He's cute! You two together or what?"

"Oh no, I pay him to keep watch over the store, and I mean, I'm not good at flirting, not like Nova."

"Moira, Nova's an actual whore, so she kind of has to be good at flirting."

"Oh, well, I know that, but I don't think he likes me that way. He's so patient  though, with all the explosions and gas clouds and electric shocks, and his eyes are so pretty, brown you know, kind of like new motor oil..." Moira drifts off, no doubt lost in daydreams about pretty eyes the color of untoasted machine lubricant.

**********

Instead of proximity mines, one burned out Corvega sedan and an off-his-rocker sniper is all it takes to completely ruin her day and possibly her life.

Lucky had almost cleared the whole town of mines when a rifle shot cracks out, whizzing past her ear. On instinct, she darts behind a ruined car for cover, which the sniper promptly shoots. She grins as his rounds harmlessly ping against the metallic car body.

Until the car starts to burn.

She doesn't understand at first, but her brain has pulled the file about explosions and the unfortunate fact that burning cars tend to produce them. Lucky ends up falling backwards on her ass and crab-scuttles away from the low hiss of building pressure in the big car's nuclear fission engine, but she isn't fast enough.

The air sucks forward with a soft whoosh of initial implosion, and then explodes out with a force that crushes the air from her lungs, neatly lifting her off her feet and backwards into the side of a building.

The world has gone eerily white, completely silent, and deathly still. Maybe this is what heaven is like.

A whole lot of nothing.

A soft ringing starts in her ears, the world creeping stealthily back into view. Sounds of crackling flame and the acrid scent of scorched car parts filter through her consciousness, but it is the intense pain her left leg that brings the world rushing back.

It’s on fire.

Shrieking in both pain and terror, she swats at the flame but freezes as another round from the sniper snaps into the house behind her. She doesn't hear the second shot so much as feel it, a searing pain on her forehead.

She’s on fire and he still wants to shoot her.

The shimmering heat and smoke from the burning car is throwing off his shot, but if she doesn't get her ass behind cover, he really is going to brain her. Steeling herself against the pain, she grits her teeth and drags herself around the corner of the wall. She lies there, panting, trying to clear her head to assess the damage.

The flame has fizzled out, but the leg is in bad shape; she doesn't even have to look at it to know that.

It smells like a goddamn Lucky barbeque.

Judging from her shaking hands and clammy, sheet-white skin, she’s going into shock as well. The world is darting and rolling before her eyes, refusing to just sit still a minute, also telling her she’s got a nice concussion. Something hot and wet slides down a cheek and she decides she's probably crying.

Fumbling in her pack, Lucky hisses with frustration as she finds one, single, solitary stimpak.

One.

With two devastating wounds, she now has to pick which one to take care of, letting the other just hang out in all its gruesome glory.

She can't think like this, with cotton standing in for her brain. She dumps her pack upside down, praying she finds the Med-X syringe left over from the Super Duper Mart adventure and pumps her fist in triumph, immediately regretting it as the world slides sideways. Planning on selling it rather than using it, she had tossed it in the bottom of her pack and promptly forgotten about it.

Another mistake she will not repeat.

Lucky grabs the stimpak in her fist. She hates this. Sticking a big needle behind your ear is uncomfortable at the best of times, and this is rating as one of the worst times she has experienced thus far.

'Fuck it,' she says, and slams the needle into the sweet spot behind her ear, not quite bone and not quite flesh, that strange amalgam of tissue that doesn’t really know what it wants to be. The world steadies a bit as the drug tingles through her head, and at least her vision is coming back. The pain in her leg, however, is crippling.

Finding the nice, juicy basilic vein in the crook of her arm is not as easy on herself as it would have been on a patient, but after a bit of searching, she finds it and slides the Med-X needle home as dosage calculations swim in her head.

_Weight-based dosing of 5 units per kilogram, a 20 year old female with unimpaired renal function, weighing 110 pounds, roughly 50 kilograms, would require 250 units, or one half of a standard 500 unit syringe._

She doesn’t dare push the plunger down farther than halfway. If her math is wrong, she could easily overdose, especially as shocky as she knows her vital signs have to be. She lets out a wheezy breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding as the numbing chemical seeps through her bloodstream.

Without the pain crowding her judgement, she could inspect her leg objectively. The skin of her calf and shin is mostly gone with horrible curled and blackened edges. White bone blinks out from beneath red muscle, winking a hello it should never be allowed to. She hisses through her teeth at the sight and her stomach turns. It's different seeing an injury on your own body, but at least the armored vault suit had protected her thigh and most of her knee.

The Med-X slithers its way through her pain receptors and she heaves a sigh that ends in a mad giggle. She really is lucky. Very lucky indeed. The big blood tubes haven't sprung any leaks, and who needs leg skin anyway? Gob gets along without it just fine. She can't wait to get back to Megaton and show off both her bag of deactivated landmines and her crippled limb to Moira.

"You'll never get the best of ol' Arkansas!" she hears the sniper cackle from across the street.

The Med-X is making her loopy but she's still pissed.

"Shut it, you senile fuck-knuckle!" she shrieks. "I'm gonna come back here and lay _waste_ to your ass!"

**********

Lucky marvels at the new skin on her leg. It's sensitive, but pink and fresh. The scar will be horrific, but by all rights, she should have lost the leg entirely.

"See? Almost as good as new!" Moira chirps. "You'll have scarring, more like ripples though. That one on your eyebrow, well," she frowns, "that was half healed before I got to it."

Lucky doesn't really remember getting hit there, but sure enough, Moira had delicately stitched up a glancing gunshot wound that slashed across the left half of her forehead. She shuddered to think if it would have hit her a scant two inches lower. Stimpaks can't heal a ruptured eyeball. She was going to invest in some eye protection as soon as Moira got something in stock.

"Thanks, Moira. I got to keep my leg, so you did a beautiful job. I think I'm going to go take a nap now, though. "

"Well, go on then, but don't forget about our little "Turn Yourself Into A Roman Candle of Radiation" project, ok?"

"Goddamnit, Moira."

Moira ignores her, flipping on her little holotape recorder.

"Subject's temper appears to grow shorter in an inverse correlation with the amount of pain and emotional torment sustained. In short, she is a horrible patient and her grumpiness rivals that of Rome..."

**********

_Tick tick tick tick._

Lucky stares up at the cloudless sky as she lies flat on her back. The sun-warmed water unknots her sore muscles, and even as waves of nausea lap slowly at her stomach, she can't think of a moment she has been so relaxed.

The cheery clicking of her Pip-Boy’s onboard Geiger counter is soothing in its steady rhythm. She imagines Father Time, ticking off each second with a snap of his fingers, unhurried and unconcerned with the pleadings of mere mortals to make his tempo go faster or slower.

The smiling face of Confessor Cromwell appears over her view of the open sky. "My child! Are you also basking in the Glow of Atom? Seeking peace and respite in His Light?"

She makes a little shrug and slaps the water gently with downturned palms, enjoying the way it flows through her fingers.

"Sure, why not?”

"It is impossible to resist the glorious fission that is Atom. It is said that you are kind to the Enlightened One who is being held against his will in Moriarty’s den of iniquity. Is this true?"

"Enlightened One? You mean Gob? Cause he's a ghoul?"

Cromwell frowns. "We would not call that blessed being such a disrespectful name."

"I wouldn't either. He's just Gob to me."

The frown leaves like the clearing of a storm. "You will be rewarded for your kindness, dear one.”

She sits up and vomits into the puddle. Wiping her mouth with her sleeve, she peers at Cromwell's face and wonders why there are two of him. "Well, preacher man, I'm not feeling so rewarded at the moment. In fact, I'm feeling a little overcooked."

“Yes, you are taking your worship very seriously, but unless you wish to experience that ultimate and most joyous of divisions, I suggest you remove your earthly body from this sacred site quickly and for an interminable time.”

Lucky glances at her Pip-Boy for confirmation that she is indeed done cooking. "Holy shit on a shingle! 900 rads! I gotta go!"

She flounders up out of the puddle and crawls up the metal walkway on her hands and knees, shaking and sweating and dry heaving the whole way.

Why is her Pip-Boy still ticking? The water is still in her clothes? Her eyes aren't working and can only see the door to Craterside Supply through a haze of red. Something hot is on her face. She’s hot all over.

She bangs on the door with a weak fist, but no one answers. When did her arms get so heavy?

"Moira, you twitterpated ditz! Open this goddamn..."

The door swings open and Lucky topples inside.

"Such mean words! Oh you are just…” Moira's eyes get wide, "the worst," she whispers.

**********

“What the shit, Moira?! You told me everything would be fine!”

“It will! I think.”

“You _think_?!” Lucky screeches, arms flapping.

“Rome, hold her down, please. She’s becoming irrational.”

The merc harrumphs but does as he's told. “That’s not the only irrational thing around here.”

Lucky screeches louder. “The fact that I’m _bleeding out of my eyes_ is irrational, _MOIRA_!”

“Hey, so why _is_ she bleeding from her eyes?”

“Rome, hush! You’re scaring her!”

“Moira Brown, if you don't fix this, I will _end_ you!” Lucky yells as she thrashes like a beached whale.

“I do _not_ get paid enough for this.” Rome gripes.

“Oh, you do too. Now hold down her arms." Moira takes a deep breath and lets it out with 'hooo' sound that relaxes her whole frame as she shakes out her hands.

"Ok, a little brahmin milk, a couple of magnets…”

**********

“So, there was a teeny, tiny, little, itty bitty, um, well, mutation.”

Lucky just stares daggers with her arms crossed.

“Um, well, it appears to be benign, at least. In fact, you might find it downright nifty! If you hang out near radiation, that is.”

The silence stretches out like an angry, hungry thing, eating up all the noise. Moira wonders how someone so small can be so scary.

Moira laughs nervously. “Well, it _is_ nifty. When you have crippled limbs, you can hang out near a radiation source and if you get advanced radiation sickness, I like to call it ARS for short, like what pirates used to say, 'arrrrr!' But plural, you know, like lots of them saying it at once."

Nothing. The quiet is so complete, Moira can hear the wind sigh through the sheet metal roof.

"Anyway, your limbs will heal up just like that!” She snaps her fingers for emphasis.

There is no response, not even a twitch of an eyebrow.

Moira is beginning to fear for her bodily safety. Maybe her calculations were wrong. Lucky must be starting the ghoulification process but skipping straight to the feral part.

“Rome, would you come over here, please? Stand right here? Yes, perfect.”

Moira hides behind an exasperated Rome and peeks around his side. “So, one other small side effect, and I’m so sorry about this, I didn’t think it would ever happen. You got dosed so fast, and I decontaminated you just as quick as I could, and honestly, taking 974 rads and surviving _is_ pretty incredible…”

“What, Moira? Just say it." Lucky’s voice is soft, knifing through Moira’s chest sharper than all the silences in the world.

“Um, you might not be able to, ah, reproduce. I’m not sure, but, it doesn’t seem too likely.”

Lucky’s jaw has dropped and she stares blankly. “I can’t...no…won’t…” It appears that her brain has shut down. “Babies.” Lucky is still speaking words, which is a fairly good sign, but the few she does say are not very coherent.

Moira shakes her head. “No.”

“No babies,” Lucky says again, as if repetition might get her a different answer.

“No. Probably not. I’m so sorry.”

Lucky turns smoothly on her heel and walks out the door, and all Moira can do is watch as her new friend, no, scratch that, _only_ friend, walks away from her into the fading light.

“Lucky! I’m sorry!”

Lucky stops but doesn’t turn around.

“Me too.”

**********

Moira sits at her desk, absently twirling a pencil between her grease-stained fingers, staring at the schematics for a new weapon she’s been trying to improve. The delicate lines and figures swim as her eyes fill with tears.

“Rome?”

He grunts an acknowledgement that she has addressed him. She chokes out a sigh.

“Why don’t I have any friends?”

Rome’s eyebrows knit together into what Moira decides she will call ‘the angry thinking face’, and it’s adorable. He looks as if he might actually answer because he is thinking about her question, but it probably won’t be the answer she wants, hence the angry part.

“You’re too nice, too honest,” he finally answers, still thinking. “Too smart,” he adds.

“But aren’t those good things?” She looks up at him, and one eye is stubbornly refusing to keep its tears in.

The knitted eyebrows come apart and his face rearranges itself into an expression she has not seen on him before. She does not understand what it means.

“It scares people. They’re scared of things they don’t understand.”

“You understand me though,” she blurts out before she can stop herself, “right?”

His face shutters back into the mask of indifference he usually wears, the one that says he can’t be bothered with anything at all. “Well enough,” he answers, an unspoken signal that he is done with the conversation.

She twirls her pencil some more. The calculus equation detailing both the pounds of force required to propel a teddy bear to speeds that would cause mortal injury and the effect its furry fabric will have on its air resistance and trajectory is starting to look like an abstract watercolor painting instead of a physics formula. She will have to write it out all over again.

Moira can’t bring herself to care.


	5. A Hunter of Men

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration brought to you by:
> 
> Small Things - Ben Howard
> 
> Way Down We Go (Stripped) - Kaleo
> 
> Rumble - Link Ray
> 
> Sneeuwland - Oskar Schuster
> 
> Rue des Trois Feres - Fabrizio Paterlini
> 
> Sleeping Lotus - Joep Beving

_ Remember, procreation is your civic duty! _

Lucky moves at night and sleeps during the day, the stars her only company. Venus, the Evening and Morning Star, despite being a planet and not a star at all, is there to greet her as she wakes at dusk and is still there at dawn to send her off to sleep again. Its constancy is a reminder that no matter how many bombs fall, or how many worlds are destroyed, there are some things in this universe that are nigh unto unchangeable.

_ Behold, children are a heritage, the fruit of the womb a reward. _

There is no rhyme or reason to her wanderings. She walks for miles, sometimes in wide concentric circles, other times in straight lines, choosing her path arbitrarily - whichever way the wind is blowing, the direction a dust devil spins, following a certain constellation because the name amuses her.

_ A fruitful land into a salt waste, all because of the wickedness of those who dwell in it. _

Polaris, the North Star, so steady in the sky, the whole universe seems to circle around it. It makes her think of all the explorers and sailors over the centuries who must have trusted it to guide them unfailingly every night, just as she is now. Sirius, the dog of Orion the Hunter is another favorite. She likes the bright, faithful hound from her dad's stories. 

_ The empty grave and the barren woman; the earth that forever thirsts for water and the fire that never says, ‘It is enough.’ _

She fears she’s going feral. Her skin hasn’t fallen off yet, but with as many rads as she’s taken, ghoulification is a real possibility. Lucky has learned much about ghouls, from both Gob and Moira. Moira had said you could go from human to feral ghoul in hours, days, or weeks. She feels herself slipping into something else, something she’s not sure she could pull herself out of. It’s easiest just to slip under and not worry. And why shouldn’t she just let go? In the big scheme of things, she is nothing but another non-descript grain of sand, indistinguishable from the rest.

No one will even miss her.

_ Every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. _

Wild and terrible, she wanders the Wastes in shadow and with murder in her steps. She feels a pull to chew and bite and rip and is irritated that her teeth are so blunt and useless. Freshly let blood would be good on her tongue, an irrefutable sign that she is alive and something else is dead. 

It’s just like Jack London said. ‘There is one law of the wild - eat or be eaten.’ She is more savage than the savage, and so she survives. Hunting man and animal, she learns the rhythm and sway of both in their lives and their deaths. She butchers them - the animals neatly and dispassionately for meat - but the humans, those she butchers with a blood spattered smile.

The girl on the mattress visits her, both in her dreams and sometimes when awake. She whispers soft promises of retribution and violence into Lucky’s ears and the sound is soft and beautifully dangerous. But she is more cruel than Lucky could have imagined.

Lucky bristles with weapons - assault rifle for mid-range, silenced 10mm for close work, hunting rifle for further shots, two combat knives, one at the small of her back and the other in her boot, a bag of landmines, and a nasty lead pipe for blunt trauma. Preferring to save her ammunition, she usually lets the raiders lie there, cursing and choking on their own blood as she looks longingly at the red rivulets running along the corner of a mouth. A few though, they garble ‘I’m sorry’ or 'please'. 

“ _ Why waste the bullets?” the girl on the mattress asks. She's leaning up against the wall, examining the dead-purple fingernails of her remaining arm with a dispassionate nonchalance. She doesn't seem to notice that she's naked from the shoulders down. “Just leave them.” _

Lucky dispatches the begging raiders with a crushing blow to the head. 

_ The girl on the mattress sighs and shrugs her shoulders like she doesn't know if she should care, but she fixes her opaque eyes in a condescending stare. “You're going to have to be meaner than this.” _

The raiders are quiet and still on the ground, and Lucky considers it a mercy they don’t deserve, but she reasons that she’s not a bad person. Not really. 

Right?

_ Give me children, or I shall die. _

_ ********** _

There are three men coming up on her, not shittily dressed like raiders - more like the generic wastelander type - but they have rifles, and look like they might know now to use them. She tenses, but fights to stay calm. Lucky hasn’t seen people in months, and she wishes they would just turn around and go away. 

But they don’t.

“Hey, missy! Need to buy some supplies?” the blonde one says, and he’s smiling, but Lucky doesn’t think it looks right on him somehow. She's learned to be wary of anyone she comes across out here. Wanderers are no good, and just like her, they’re savage, solitary, and prone to violence. 

“Maybe.” Words are hard, and she’d rather not speak any at all. But she’s low on some things, water mostly.

“I’ve got some really good cuts of meat here, some dried jerky too. Good for travelling.” 

“What kind?” Molerat was intolerable. She’d definitely pass on that unless she was starving.

The man’s grin goes sharp, and Lucky definitely doesn’t like it. “Oh, it’s the best meat you’ll find in the Wastes. Real tender.” One of his friends sniggers into his sleeve, and Lucky’s highly developed sense of danger tingles.

“Didn’t answer the question,” she growls. “What kind?” 

“Here, just look.” He pulls out what appears to be a skinned animal leg, but it doesn’t look like any animal Lucky has ever butchered before, and she’s butchered them all, learning every graceful curve and claw,muscle and bone. But as she truly looks, she notices the smooth striations of gastrocnemius, the wraparound tibialus anterior, and the round white wink of a patella, she realizes, yes, she  _ has _ butchered an animal like this before.

Lucky doesn’t throw up - those days are long behind her - but the wave of nausea isn’t from disgust, it’s from anger. 

“Nice,” Lucky hears herself say. “Where do you like to hunt?”

“Here and there,” the man says breezily.

“Right. Trade secret. Well, I think I’m set, but thanks.” 

“No worries!” one says too brightly. “We’d love to have you for dinner tonight. We’re just starved!”

Lucky puts on her best smile, and knows that if she plays this wrong, not only will she be killed, she’ll be eaten too. They’re ambush predators, luring their prey to a likely spot with promises of food and water - an easy kill made even easier because they can just kill her at their camp without having to cart her dead carcass across the wasteland.

“That’s so nice! Are you sure?”

“Of course! We’d be honored!” 

“Lead on then!” she says with her biggest, winningest smile. It cracks her cheeks and she hates it.

They walk for a few miles, until they reach a busted-ass shack. 

“Home sweet home!” one says, turning to her, eyes going comically wide with fear at the rifle muzzle in his face.

She shoots them each in the head.

_ Rat-tat-tat. _

The house is filled with the drying carcasses of people. Their pieces aren’t even all together. Skin of all shades on tanning racks. Legs in one pile, arms in another. Torsos over here, organs in buckets.

_ The girl on the mattress laughs, and it grates. “Oh, sweetie. This is the Wasteland. What did you expect?” _

As Lucky douses the house in flamer fuel and tosses a Molotov cocktail through a broken window, she wonders just exactly how many pieces a person has that can be broken.

**********

Coming up to a fence, she hears a terrible racket, people howling with laughter, the kind only raiders make. Lucky crouches immediately, hidden in the shadows of twilight, creeping forward slowly, and what she sees makes her sick. Three raiders surround a dog while it tenaciously guards something on the ground.

“What a dog! He looks strong, might be good to have around.”

“Yeah, or he’ll eat you in your sleep.”

“C'mere mutt!” a raider says as he puts out a hand to grab the dog. Quick as thought, sharp white teeth flash out, biting the hand and pulling back. The dog is smart, not to hang on when it has just a hand and not a throat.

“Little fucker!” the raider cries out, smacking at the dog with a wicked looking tire iron. 

Like with the girl on the mattress, another little something breaks inside.

_ Rat-tat-tat _ . The tire iron-wielding raider is down, but now the others are alerted to her presence, the dog forgotten in the face of gunfire. One runs at her with a pistol, but she fills his chest full of holes. She turns swiftly and walks her spread up the last raider’s torso and grins with the satisfaction of a job well done.

Lucky hears a soft, wet pop, so close, yet impossibly far away. It has somehow become very hard to breathe as a giggle chimes in her ear.

“Gotcha.”

Lucky stupidly tries to do some simple math. There were three raiders, three were dead, and now there is one? 3 minus 3 equals 1? That doesn't sound right at all. It flies right in the face of basic mathematical principles.

She doesn’t have time to get into the more nuanced aspects of number theory to determine how a integer subtracted from itself could be anything other than zero. The raider at her side goes down with a grunt and then a scream and all Lucky can do is sink to her knees and watch in absolute and morbid fascination.

The dog is quite literally ripping the raider apart. She is weaponless, as she had left her combat knife stuck in Lucky’s ribs, and is scrabbling uselessly at the dog’s thick ruff. Her frantic kicks go wide, the dog easily ducking and twisting its head up with a open jawed snap, slashing leg flesh in the process. The dog is much too fast, darting in to rip and tear, only to dance away again. The bleeding raider tries to run, but the dog launches off spring-loaded back legs and knocks her down. With a rumbling growl, it sinks its fangs into her throat and shakes. A short, strangled scream, a spray of bright arterial blood, and it’s all over.

The dog looks terrifying as it shakes itself, droplets of red flinging off the tips of black and silver fur. It trots up to her and sits down a few yards away, but even with a bloody tongue lolling out and panting hard, it's definitely smiling. And what a smile, white teeth stained red, with raider blood covering its snout all the way up to its different-colored eyes.

“Oh, aren’t you just lovely!” she whispers. "Are you a boy or a girl?" She glances down and finds her answer. "Right. A boy."

After deciding she isn’t in any immediate danger, (if he hasn’t eaten her already, he probably isn’t going to, she reasons) Lucky carefully fishes out a stimpak from the lunchbox she carries her medical supplies in. If the exploding car and sniper in Minefield (she refers to it as the 'Fuck-Knuckle Incident') has taught her anything, it’s that organization and preparedness can mean the difference between life and death.

Gritting her teeth, she pulls the knife out from between her ribs and quickly doses what is surely a punctured lung. She sighs as that peculiar tingle of knitting flesh that a stimpak always induced winds its way through her side.

“You hungry?” She rummages around in her pack and grimaces at the only bit of food she can find. “Fucking dog meat. Oh, this is terrible. You can’t eat that.” The dog belly crawls toward her with a look on his face that says, yes, he could indeed eat that. 

“Oh fine, you cannibal.”

She holds out the meat in her hand, palm up so if he snatched at it, he wouldn’t catch her fingers. The dog sniffs suspiciously, but eventually takes it with a delicate little snap, bolts it down, and immediately searches her hand with snuffles for more. Finding a still empty palm, he gives her hand an experimental swipe with a slobbery tongue and sits down grinning, tail thumping like a metronome. Lucky laughs and it sounds like a door with rusty hinges.

She feeds him the rest, pouring a bottle of water out into an old hubcap that makes a perfect, if wobbly, dog dish. He drinks it all in one go, covering her hand in more slobber as thanks.

“What’s your name? No collar?” Dogs in the tapes always had collars with their names on them. He whines pitifully, dashing back and forth between her and a cloth covered lump on the ground. Hauling herself to her feet, she goes to investigate.

A man lies in the dirt, dressed in a trader’s outfit. If the smell and bloated body says anything, it is that he has been dead for weeks.

“You’ve been out here, all this time, just keeping him company, huh?” The dog lies next to the body, chin on his paws and looks up at her mournfully. 

Lucky has murdered raiders in their sleep, blown them up with mines, shot them in the back of the head, and slit their throats from behind and drained them of blood like butchered brahmin. She had unloaded half a clip in one’s face with spectacularly bloody results, and had smiled at the spattered gore. She had tricked them, stalked them, and finally killed them with a gritty violence she had not thought herself capable of.

Lucky thought that she had lost all emotion for dead things, but she simply can’t leave the body here like this. The scavenger hadn’t done anything wrong, just trading junk and trying to survive in this godforsaken hellhole. Dragging pieces of metal and car parts, she begins gently covering the body. The dog sits up and is watching her intently with his head cocked to the side.

Sweat dripping into her eyes from exertion and the still painful ribs, she grouses, “Well, are you just gonna sit there, or are you gonna help me?”

To her surprise, he starts digging with his front paws under a particularly large car, pausing only to snuffle and snort into the hole as if searching for something. The dog drags out a small pack and drops it at her feet, tail wagging a mile a minute, looking very pleased with himself.

She brushes off the dirt and opens it to find a couple syringes of Med-X, a few stimpaks, a conductor, a clip of 5.56 rounds, a toy car, two bottles of purified water, and 25 caps.

“I’ll be goddamned. What a good dog!"

The dog practically vibrates with happiness at the praise. "You gonna come with me? You can’t stay here, you’ll starve.”

The dog stands between her and the body that is effectively buried above ground, as if weighing his options. He takes a last look at his old master, and trots to Lucky’s side. She bends down and scratches him behind the ears, like she has seen in the tapes, and he gratefully leans into her touch.

“Guess you need a name, huh? How about Dogmeat? That’s the first thing I ever gave you.”

He barks and gambols around her like an overgrown puppy, grinning his dog smile.

_ The girl on the mattress sniffs disapprovingly. "You'll only get him killed." _

_ ********** _

Dogmeat decides this new goddess is more than acceptable. She has fed him a delicious, yet vaguely familiar meat, got him a bowl of water, and scratched his ears, which is most excellent. He thinks he could even get her to rub the favorite spot between his eyes. 

The goddess had asked him to follow with a kind word and a crook of her finger, and seeing that his old god would not be waking, he supposed it was for the best. Dogmeat knows dead when he sees it, and does not like to be alone. 

She is  _ his _ Goddess now. She has given him a new name, and while he does not understand its meaning, it is no less important. She speaks it in a happy and kind voice, and that is very good. 

There is one mystery he can't quite solve, however. Why had she covered up his old god? Perhaps she did it to protect him and save him for later, like he did with a particularly good bone. He decides his Goddess is more than intelligent. 

He is annoyed that he hadn't thought of it himself. 

**********

Lucky stumbles onto a footbridge that is completely out of place in the empty Wasteland. Of course, she’s curious, so she has to check it out. Gingerly following it, she comes upon a lonely house on the top of a butte. She understands the bridge now; it's the only way to or from the house, a very defensible position. Maybe she could set up here, take a break for a while. She and Dogmeat have been going hard for months now, and she's exhausted. Hopefully, it's uninhabited.

_ The girl on the mattress grins, and her teeth are turning grey. “It could be yours. Just take it.” _

The door is locked. Lucky gets on her knees and tries to pick it, but the lock is positively confounding. It has twists and tumblers she’s never seen before. As she puzzles over it, the door swings open, catching her in the shoulder and bowling her backwards straight onto her ass.

Dogmeat growls and snaps by her side, but she stills and motions him down as a gun barrel is poked so close to her nose she has to cross her eyes to see it.

“And just what do you think you’re doing?” 

Lucky slowly puts her hands up. Dogmeat is silent, lying flat but ready to pounce at a moment’s notice.

“I didn’t think anyone lived here. I’m sorry. I promise I didn’t break your lock.” Her voice sounds strange after months of not using it.

The old woman in front of her looks both irritated and positively  _ ancient _ . “I’m not worried about the goofy lock, child, I’m worried about raiders killing me in my sleep.”

“You got raider trouble?” Lucky feels her eyes flash and her voice go hard. It’s difficult reigning in emotions when you’re out of practice. 

The woman pulls the gun back and laughs, and to Lucky, it sounds lovely, like happiness and a life well spent.

“Not really, but imagine my surprise when I hear an imp scratching at my door in the middle of the night. Now, if your dog doesn’t bite, both of you come in and have something to drink.”

“Are you sure? I did just try to break into your house…I mean, I didn’t know it was your house, not that I would break into anyone's house, but, you know, we should probably get going...” Lucky trails off, not sure how to extricate herself from the hole she has dug. She really just wants to get away. People are too much for her right now. She wants silence and dark and solitude. That's why she likes this house on the bluff, for its very loneliness.

The woman just laughs and pulls Lucky to her feet. “What’s your name dear?”

“Lucky. And this is Dogmeat.”

She snorts, but smiles. “He looked like he was going to eat me if I so much as harmed a hair on your head. I’m Agatha. Now come on, good dog! I have treats!” She whistles and pats her hands on her thighs, and Dogmeat bounces up to her as if ripping her face off had never even crossed his mind. 

“Traitor,” Lucky mutters under her breath.

_ “He’ll leave you, you know,” the girl on the mattress says. “Just like everyone else always does.” _

**********

Agatha tells them (she includes Dogmeat in the conversation) all about her late husband, her homemade violin, and where she thinks a better one might be. Lucky had read extensively on all sorts of things, music history being only one of many subjects that interested her. She is sure the Vault contained more reading material than the whole outside world combined. That a Stradivarius violin, one of the most perfect examples of its kind, might still survive in this hellhole is unfathomable, but Agatha doesn't seem the type to be taken by flights of fancy. 

She feeds them both, asking nothing in return, but Lucky piles up things she has collected that might be useful to an old woman living alone in a world made of nightmares. 

Agatha makes good on her promise of dog treats, pressing a bag of the dried molerat bits into her hands. They are shaped into tiny bones. “For later. I made them for Crow’s dog, but she passed on last month. Went after one of those giant radscorpions like a fool. Too brave for their own good, these Wasteland mutts." Agatha shakes her head. "Don't let Pretty Boy here do that, or you'll lose him for sure." She ruffles Dogmeat's ears and smiles as he tries to sit on her feet. "I’ll just have to keep making them so he drags you back here to visit me.”

“He’s Lassie turned Judas, all for thirty pieces of molerat," Lucky grumbles.

Agatha throws back her head and laughs, high and clear, and the way she can just let loose and laugh in such a shitastic world makes Lucky want to both laugh with her, and cover her ears and scream.

"You've got a demon in you, child," Agnes says conversationally, like she's describing the best laundry detergent to use on a particular stain.

Lucky goes still as stone and can only stare. Dogmeat cocks his head and looks back and forth between the two, perceptive as always. 

Agatha laughs again, quieter this time. "Oh, don't look so shocked. I don't mean in the biblical sense, that's hogwash. But you've got something mean eating at you, and if you don't get rid of it, it'll swallow you whole."

Lucky has nothing to say, and isn't sure she could speak even if she did. 

"Ah, but it's not my business. You've been a real dear to me. I know this violin isn't the best, but it's all I have for the moment. You just sit and rest and I'll play for you."

Agatha closes her eyes and a look of complete peace settles on her features as she warms up with a few scales.

The running notes coming from the ratty violin are slightly off key, but not enough to matter. 

And then she starts to play.

It’s soft and sweet, and Christ on a fucking cracker, it  _ hurts _ . It speaks of sunshine on cold hands, cool drinks of water on hot days, and the beginning of a fresh new world too young to know that it could be destroyed. 

Agatha's eyes flash open, glittering in the dim lantern light, and Lucky can see something wild and hungry, yet completely satisfied. Her fingers, even gnarled with age, move across the violin strings in a complicated dance and the sound swells into something else, too huge and sharp to be fully understood.

Another little something breaks inside, but it's okay because it is a small, putrid piece of rot that  _ needs _ to break, and its million fragments writhe through her veins and tear at her gut with claws so vicious she feels sick, but the music goes soft and sweet again, drawing it out and casting it aside, like it was never there at all.

Lucky’s face is wet when the notes finally fade away into the high ceiling. Her hands shake and Dogmeat is sitting on her feet with his nose pressed into her palm, sensing something is wrong. 

"It's ok, baby-dog. Mama’s fine," she hears herself say in a voice she doesn't recognize, rubbing her knuckles between his eyes the way she knows he likes. The dog relaxes and grunts with happiness.

"Thank you, Agatha. That was..." She trails off because there are no words. 

Agatha just laughs. "Of course, child. Imagine what it could be if I had a real violin!"

Lucky has never known something so clearly in all her life. 

"I will get you that violin, Agatha."


	6. The World It Is A' Changin'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration brought to you by:
> 
> September Song - Agnes Obel
> 
> Alone In Kyoto - Air
> 
> Vladimir's Blues - Max Richter
> 
> Petrichor - Ludovico Einaudi

The door slams open and Moira’s eyes almost pop out of her head as she takes in the dusty, worn, and inexplicably hardened face that the sandstorm has blown in.

“Lucky!” she squeaks as Rome quickly steps in front of her, acting like a living shield, gun drawn, but pointed down. “I…”

There's large patches of blood on her armored suit, the red turning the dark blue even darker, into a color that shouldn't exist. Her long, wild hair is gone, cut raggedly at the nape of her neck in a bob that would have been jaunty and cute had it not been sprinkled with dust and blood.

She looks like a killer, and Moira knows it’s all her fault.

Lucky holds up a hand. “Listen, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gotten so upset with you. I understand you did the best you could and I appreciate it.” It was a speech, Moira notices, one worn thin with practice.

“You aren’t here to kill me?”

Lucky’s hand drops and a pained look crosses her face as she hugs herself. “Jeez, Moira, of course not! You’re about the only friend I’ve got out here, you, Gob, and Dogmeat.”

“Dogmeat?”

“Well, yeah. I kept him outside. I wasn’t sure about your policy on animals.”

She lets out a soft whistle and the prettiest dog Moira has ever seen trots in through the still open door and sits next to Lucky, tongue lolling out and looking perfectly happy.

“Oh, wow!” Moira squeals, forgetting all about her imminent death. She darts around Rome before he can stop her, running to the dog with the oblivious delight of a child.

The dog leaps forward, nose crinkled up in a savage growl that freezes Moira in her tracks and makes Rome raise his rifle. Lucky sweeps her palm down and flat. The dog lies down immediately, growl dying in his throat, tail swishing the floor. Rome lowers his rifle but keeps it at the ready.

“He’s not friendly?”

"Oh no, he is, he just thought you might hurt me.” Lucky smiles and Moira’s chest releases the clench it had on her heart. The smile almost looks right, but something fundemental has changed, something important.

“He really wants to like you. Hold your hand out and let him sniff.”

Moira tentatively offers her hand, and the dog sniffs curiously. She giggles as he licks it with a broad swipe of his tongue.

“Tickles! Can I pet him?”

“He’d like that very much.” She pets his head with long, gentle strokes, marveling at the soft fur of his ears. Dogmeat leans into her, and she laughs.

“Why, he’s just a big softie for all that growling, aren’t you?” Moira says, smiling as the dog sits on her feet in an attempt to get closer to her caresses.

“Well, he’ll tear the face off a raider, but he’s a teddy bear to his friends.” The clench in her chest is back again.

“Lucky, I’m really sorry. I never thought that would happen. I just got so excited with the book and I didn’t think and you were gone for months and I thought you died and it’s all my fau-”

Lucky crosses the distance in a few quick steps and hugs her fiercely, and Moira can only stand there like an idiot.

“If I’ve learned anything when I was wandering around, it’s that the world is a terrible place. Friends are important,” Lucky says into her neck.

Lucky straightens and wipes her teary eyes and laughs. “Making me cry, you mean lady! Now, what’s up for the next chapter in the book?”

**********

As Lucky shakes off the remains of the twelfth mole rat to explode from being hit with the “repellent” stick and Dogmeat happily rolls in it, she is reminded how positively bizarre life in the Wasteland can truly be.

**********

Lucky wipes the sweat from her brow with the back of the arm that isn’t shoulder deep in a three ton nuclear device capable of unbridled destruction.

This was a terrible idea.

It’s too late to back out now. She had torn off the housing, wormed her way into its guts, and it was do or die, with a healthy probability on ‘die.’

She holds a little lantern between her teeth for light and almost drops it in a giggle when she thinks how she probably looks absolutely insane and a little like Dogmeat when he found something particularly foul to chew on and she tries to take it from him.

She just needs a few centimeters, just a scant two or three, and she will be home free. She can see the little fucknut of a blue wire that snipping would either be the salvation of Megaton, or an unmitigated disaster.

What is it with all the important wires being blue?

Before she could talk herself out of it or dwell on the consequences, she gives a little lunge and snips it, snaps her eyes shut, and cringes. The clickings and whirrings of cycling circuit boards and tiny gears sound too loud in her ears, the audible harbinger of doom.

Maybe it won't hurt. Maybe it will happen so fast, she won't even notice it happened at all.

But by some Wasteland miracle, there is only silence. Blessed, beautiful silence.

She flops down into the water, laughing and hooting like a maniac, howling her victory to the stars. Cromwell looks out his window and just smiles at what he thinks is her worshipping the great and glorious Atom again.

What he doesn’t know definitely won’t hurt him.

**********

Dogmeat likes traveling with Goddess across the Wastes, but now she has taken him to a place full of strangers and even stranger smells.

She sings and talks to him all the time now, especially after the small house on the hill and the old one that made sounds strange enough to make Goddess both happy and nervous. Old-One couldn't have been too bad though; she had treats.

Dogmeat hopes they can visit her again.

Goddess demands obedience, and it is a comfort to follow her commands. She gives him clear signs with her flexible fingers and hands. A flat hand swept down means 'get down and stay quiet', a fist means 'stay', a single finger waved in a circle means 'check it out', and two means 'go hunting.'

The hunting is his favorite.

He is not to hunt foes with the guns, only those with weapons that hit or stab. The humans are easy. They do not have teeth or claws, and can only fight with silly kicks, swinging clubs, or one armed stabs. They are slow, and so very loud.

Dogmeat fights the wild dogs, and even armed with exactly the same claws and teeth, they are no match for him. When he was very young, a few years beyond a puppy, there had been a god that had taught him to fight other dogs in a pit. It was bloody, and painful, but fun. He was big and smart and learned quickly how to destroy them before they destroyed him. He destroys these wild dogs here and now, and it is no less fun.

Goddess thinks so too.

It sends a thrill through him when she shows him her teeth. Goddess has odd ways of showing her approval. Showing one's teeth should be a threat and a warning, but Goddess shows hers to friends and foes alike. Her lips curl up over her white teeth every time she fires her noisy weapon or when she meets another, more docile human on the road. He notices, however, something different in the set of her shoulders and angle of her body, and he can now easily differentiate between the two.

He is ashamed to have growled at the female-friend who smelled like machine parts. If Machine-Parts had come nearer, he would have bitten her. But Goddess was so very _nervous_ , so nervous it made his nose itch. She did not strike him for this grievous error like his old god would have, but she did not approve either. She did not raise her voice, but the hand was swept down and flat with more force than necessary.

Dogmeat will not make such a mistake again.

However, she is currently lying in the dangerous water, flopping around, howling like a beast to the moon.

Goddess is strange, but he wouldn't trade her for any other in the world.

**********

"Cock-swilling fuckers!” Lucky screeches as a shot snaps off above her head and buries itself into the concrete wall.

She had just come out of the Anchorage War Memorial after planting the observer, when Talon Company showed up. Their leader went on and on about how she was too good and someone wanted her dead. Before he could finish, she shot him in the face and ran, holing up on the bottom of a flight of stairs, and pressed her body against the concrete wall for cover.

“You fucking shot me, you dick!” she wails and makes groans like she's dying.

“Looks like your ass is cooked, little girl!” a Talon Company merc taunts from behind a park bench.

She grins as she throws a few armed landmines and one devastatingly sexy bottlecap mine out onto the stairs and melts into the dark of the tunnel entrance.

“Yah? Come on over here and finish the job, you pansy-ass piece of shit!” she shrieks, with just the appropriate note of panic.

Emboldened by the lure of an easy kill, they storm down the stairs after her and she grins at the cheery beeping of her landmines as they scent out their prey, and their popping explosions are the percussion section of a beautiful yet angry orchestral piece. The bottlecap mine booms out like a showstopper kettle drum at the final crescendo, and then all is quiet, the kind of quiet that can only be heard after such intense music fades away.

The GOAT had gotten it all wrong. She should have been in the theatre.

**********

“Jenny, this is really good! I can’t believe this was a mud-eating swamp monster a few hours ago!” Lucky says.

“Mmmmhmmm,” says Moira, mouth full of mirelurk cake.

“Well, I can’t say I’ve ever gotten ingredients this fresh. That’s what makes the difference, I think,” Jenny says, trying to be nonchalant, but the pride glows on her face.

"Are you sure you didn't kill any inside the Memorial?" Moira asks.

"If you did, the test results would be totally skewed."

"You don't know how bad I wanted to just blow them all away, but this book is too important. I bagged this guy right outside the door."

Andy whistles in admiration and more than a little disbelief. "Aren't they huge and full of armor? How’d you kill it?"

Lucky sneaks a hunk of claw under the table to Dogmeat, who snaps it up. “Let’s just say the title for this chapter should be 'You Gotta Shoot ‘Em In the Face.'

**********

Gob is standing in the pool of Atom, bathed in moonlight and radiation. Lucky knows why; the swelling and bruises on his face are testament to Moriarty’s recent assholery, and the radiation is soothing to his injuries. She knows he can see her. She starts to stand up to go to him, but he quickly turns away and limps back to the bar.

Another little something breaks.

**********

"Oh, for fuck sakes," she growls under her breath.

She is lost. Again.

DC is turning out to be a disaster of winding, rubble strewn streets and crumbling, convoluted subway tunnels. She had been trying for Vault-Tec Headquarters to figure out where Agatha’s violin might be. It seemed like it was not in the heart of DC, but on the outskirts, somewhere easier to try than Three Dog’s lair.

In the back of her mind, Lucky wanted to find her dad, but being abandoned in a metal tomb with a bunch of crazy people wasn't earning him any Dad-points. She had heard Three Dog talking about her, how she had escaped the Vault, how she ran that errand for Lucy West that had turned into an episode from the Twilight Zone, how she had defused the Megaton bomb. Three Dog hadn't mentioned any names, but Dad had to know it was her. He should be looking for her, not the other fucking way around.

It was supposed to be easy, according to the back-lit signs depicting the different stations and their tunnels, all outlined in cheery reds and blues. However, nothing is in remotely the same condition as advertised. Everything is all turned around, rubble covering tunnels her Pip-Boy demands she use, whole levels and entire stations collapsed, it's a wonder she's gotten as far as she has. Everything looks the same, so she begins marking the floor with a collection of paint guns still filled with a rainbow of different colors.

Even as much as the big, open sky makes her nervous and her palms sweaty, she hates the tunnels more. While the recycled air of the Vault was stale and sterile, the tunnels reek of rack and ruin. It makes her nervous to smell such decay, and she is reminded of walking through the guts of some dead and rotting beast. But Lucky is a pragmatist, and the cover of the subway tunnels means safety from bigger and badder things.

But terrible things are still down here.

Lucky slinks through a turnstile, paying less attention than she should have been, turns a corner, and comes nose to almost-nose with a Gobbie.

But this man is so absolutely unlike her friend, it makes her heart hurt to even think of him looking like this. Eyes too big and bulging, he looks so _sick_ , limbs so twisted he has to be in terrible pain. Everything about him is wrong. Gobbie had explained that some ghouls went feral, went nuts, but he hadn't described them in detail.

This man, man-shaped at least, seems just about as surprised to be face to face with a human as she is.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

It shrieks and flings itself at her, teeth snapping inches from her face.

Dogmeat launches himself at the ghoul and knocks it off her, worrying its throat between his jaws. She draws her assault rifle, but doesn’t dare shoot for fear she'll hit Dogmeat.

Turns out she doesn’t need to.

The ghoul is already dead, and Dogmeat does not like the taste. He’s scraping his tongue with his paws and making ack sounds.

It had been a person once. Like Moira or Gob or herself. It had lived and loved and had favorite things, maybe looked at the stars or told jokes or cooked dinner. Maybe they liked the color blue or hated having dirty fingernails or had played baseball as a kid.

It might have been a person once, but it isn't anymore.

She shoots every one she can find with three quick rounds to the head.

**********

Lucky has slunk her way through the subway, painting arrows along the way, and she finally comes out of somewhere called “Museum Metro,” and is met with disaster.

If she thought the streets of DC were a war zone, this is an apocalypse shoved into a few square blocks.

Dead soldiers in metal armor are strewn everywhere, and she smells the distinctive scent of rotted flesh. She hears voices, rough and ugly, from the pit between the rows of ruined stone buildings, but can't catch the words. Parapets and bridges of boards join the gaps between what appear to be shored-up bunkers. Dogmeat, growls softly, hugging her leg as his eyes dart everywhere.

“Shh, now.”

He flicks his ears and is silent.

“I SEE YOU, TINY HUMAN! I WILL EAT YOUR ARMS!”

Her brain jumps into overdrive as it asks the very important question which all human brains who encounter unknown noises have asked since the dawn of time - ' _what the fuck was that?_ '

It swiftly accesses the file labelled, ‘Super Mutants'.

 _Green, human shaped, kinda stupid, but big enough to end you if they got a hold of you. Terrifying in gene_ ral.

‘ _Fuck this_ ,’ it sagely recommends.

Lucky wholeheartedly agrees.

She takes off at a dead run, weaving in and out of rubble, Dogmeat hot on her heels and running silent like she had asked. She’s fast, but they have the advantage of numbers, and as she runs along parallel with the bombed out bunker, they're gaining on her, swarming out of the woodwork. So she tosses grenades. It's the only think she can think of that she can do while running like her life depends on it. Which it does. So she lobs them into the trench like so many rotten peaches, and she can't even stop to admire her handiwork. Shots still ring out both ahead and behind. She has no choice but to keep running, praying she won’t get tagged. Being shot fucking hurts, and if she has to slow down, she'll be a goner. Either the grenades aren't going off, or the monsters just don't give a shit about them, because they are still fucking shooting at her.

She spies a metro tunnel entrance and her terrified brain takes over in a flurry adrenaline, making an executive decision without her conscious input.

Taking a flying leap off a pile of rubble, Lucky bypasses the escalator for the subway entrance completely and sails through the air, her weight and momentum changing her flight pattern to something alarmingly nose down. Landing with a sickening crunch sound that no human skull should make and still be intact, white hot stars blossom behind her eyes as the crown of her head strikes the concrete with all the force of a 110 pound freight train.

She can’t see, can't move, only hear sounds laced with a soft buzz. Dogmeat snuffling at her face, a gravelly, yet female voice shouting down at her, “What the hell, tourist?!” and screaming at someone named Quinn to get his ass in gear and go get Sharon from Azzer-Cruel and to shoot him in the fuckin' face if he said no.

The stars are fading fast, and the pain is setting in. Her face hurts, her neck hurts, and she finds her left arm is much longer than the other. Her brain has done some research and concludes it should not look like that. The female’s screams of anger are now laced with a subtle note of panic and an addition of a male one, shouting growly expletives about 'goddamn fucking snot-monsters.' Double dosing her injured brain with the two stimpaks squirreled away in a handy pocket of her vault suit (she has taken to calling them the 'Holy-Fuck-That-Hurts' supply) is now an automatic response. The pain mostly stops, but stimpaks only help with keeping your brain from drowning in its own blood, not with the concussion itself.

Gripping her gun in her good hand, thankfully her right, she stumbles up the stairs and into chaos. Super mutants seem to be everywhere, a female ghoul is attempting to run from one and fire a laser rifle at the same time, a male ghoul in a trader outfit is unleashing unholy hell with an assault rifle, and something breezes past her, dark, huge, and silent, slamming into a super mutant. She watches in awe as the biggest ghoul she had ever seen absolutely dismantles the monster, using its weight against it, finally ending it by shoving an appropriately large combat knife under its chin and into its brain. The whole scene seems so surreal, like she's watching a tape, but Dogmeat gently nips her calf and brings her back to the present. She decides shooting with one arm will be difficult, but not impossible.

“Tear ‘em up, baby-dog.”

She grins madly as he slinks away, taking cheap shots, darting in and shredding calves and dancing away, always moving. Her head is pounding and she feels dizzy and sick, but plays hide and seek with the monsters anyway. A mutant is behind the tall ghoul, ready to grab him by the neck. She shoots without thinking, muscles, synapses, and sinew working in concert without her explicit direction. Her ears ring and the sharp yet comforting rat-tat-tat of her rifle is lost.

Lucky frowns as the world goes completely wonky, spinning at a speed she had not thought possible.

She is going to die here, and the monsters will eat her arms simply because she has the unfortunate distinction of being a tiny human.

A soft black creeps around the edges of her vision until it fills it completely, and she slips down to a place she can't seem to crawl out of.


	7. All Hope Abandon, Ye Who Enter Here

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical Inspiration brought to you by:
> 
> Heartbroken, In Disrepair - Dan Auerbach
> 
> Again - Tomppabeats
> 
> Vluergar - Oskar Schuster
> 
> Percussion Gun - White Rabbits

Charon feels his unused muscles bunch and lengthen, delightful little shocks slithering up his ankles as his boots pound on the concrete. Running is glorious. He has not really run in what seems like years, and he is going to savor every moment.

Who knows when he will get the chance again.

He blows by the little smoothskin that has caused all the trouble, and she is a mess. She is definitely concussed, a wound somewhere in her scalp pouring startlingly red blood down a cheek. Thickly winding a ribbon down her neck, it finally disappears under her suit, and she just stands there, dazed and looking very confused.

Dispatching the mutant in front of him is, while not easy, still good work. _Bob, duck, weave, pull this arm, push that leg, get in close, follow through on the strike._ He is rewarded with a spray of blood and a gurgle. But there are other combatants here. A low growl sounds to his left as a flash of black and silver Wasteland mutt streaks past, ripping a mutant’s leg to ribbons before darting off again. Quinn is blasting mutants with his assault rifle, and Charon has the fleeting thought that his spread could be a little tighter. Willow is playing ring-around-the-rosie with a mutant, its hunting rifle, and the subway entrance.

There are more mutants, coming from all sides, and he does not like the way they swarm, but he rips them apart with both shotgun and knife. Whatever the smoothskin had done, she had definitely pissed them off, but Charon could almost thank her. Enemies, enemies all up and down the Mall, enemies he could tear to pieces and feel good about later. He feels a presence behind him and spins to face it, swinging his shotgun up into a mutant’s gut, but before he can fire, six quick shots snap out and the now dead mutant falls like a sack of grain at his feet.

A few yards away, the little smoothskin is awkwardly holding a smoking assault rifle in one hand, the other hanging loose and useless by her side. She has a smile on her face that is one part ecstatic, one part idiotic, with a healthy dash of pissed-to-fuck drunk mixed in. Stumbling forward, she trips over the dead mutant and right into his chest, and he can only blink in surprise. His instincts tell him to snap her neck for getting so close, but Ahzrukhal had sent him to kill mutants, not bell-rung smoothskins. Her eyes are wide and unseeing, jerking and rolling in their sockets as she tries to focus them on his face.

"Whatchoo doin' out here, Gobbie?” she slurs, leaning against him with her hands on his chest, like the world has pitched forwards. “How'd you get so big? Morty’s gonna be pissed if you..."

Charon never gets the chance to find out who Morty is or why he would be pissed, because the smoothskin goes limp and slithers to the dirt, her dog barking and frisking around them.

"Made a new friend, huh?" Willow teases as she lights a cigarette and takes a shaky drag. "Didn't think you were the type."

Willow is the only one he does not mind teasing him. Charon likes that she just does not give two shits about anything except smoking cigarettes and shooting things. It is a life choice he can really get behind. He shrugs noncommittally and stares down at the crumpled heap in the dirt.

"Good friends, if you ask me," Quinn says conversationally.

"Gobbie, the monsters are gonna eat me ‘cause I'm a tiny human," the heap mumbles sadly up at him.

"Why does she keep calling you ‘Gobbie’? Like Carol's Gob?" Quinn asks.

Charon is silent and Willow pipes up, "Because her head's smashed in. Charon, can you take her to Barrows? If you can't, Quinn can do it."

Charon reviews his orders minutely, going over every syllable. It is the only form of rebellion he can exercise, and while he does not do it often, he enjoys it immensely when he gets the chance. It is like a game, to find each and every loophole in Ahzrukhal's commands.

 

_Ahzrukhal is flirting with some new ghoulette. And by new, she is brand-new, and not just to Underworld, but to being a ghoul at all. She just wants to feel pretty again, and Ahzrukhal is trying to weasel her into trying Jet for the first time._

_Quinn tears in, "Muties are making a push and we need Charon."_

_Ahzrukhal waves unconcernedly in Charon's direction, never taking his eyes off the poor creature he has trapped at his bar._

_"Take care of it," his employer says._

_Snaking a hand out to rest an inch or two from his new captive, he smiles - the predatory, greasy one that usually gets what he wants. She giggles, and just like that, Charon knows Ahzrukhal has reeled in another one._

_"The safety of Underworld is very important to me, you see, especially some of its more beautiful residents..."_

 

Ahzrukhal never said anything about what to do after he ‘took care of it’ or what ‘it’ actually was, Charon reasons. He nods his head, lifts her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and carries her inside.

 

**********

 

“Tell it again!”

“Come on, guys! It’s been two weeks! You don't have anything more interesting to talk about?”

“No!” the whole bar shouts as one.

Willow sighs, but she’s had a few whiskies and is feeling generous.

“Ok, so it all started off normal, you know? Muties were quiet, probably chewing on what was left of The Bastards of Steel.” She flicks her fingers out in insult.

"Anyway, something stirred up the greenies and I’m telling you, they were _pissed_. Then I see this tourist smoothskin, no bigger than a minute, tearing down the street like her ass is on fire, throwing grenades like candy at a damn parade, and a dog’s following behind, having the time of his life.”

All the ghouls are listening in rapt attention, and she smiles. It's nice to talk with people every once and awhile, especially when they aren’t doing the talking.

“The muties are chasing after her like she stole all their gore bags, and she just keeps on running like she’s got somewhere to go. I thought she was gonna keep running all the way down the Mall, but she decides one hole is as good as another, and takes a dive off the top of the stairs and into the metro tunnel. Flew through the air like she was carried by the grace of God.”

The bar echoes with laughter when she makes an airplane of her one hand and crash lands it into the other with a _boosh_ explosion sound. She even catches Charon’s lips quirk a bit on one side. Willow's telling a good story if that terrifying bastard would laugh.

“Quinn gets Charon - by the way, thanks Ahzrukhal, you’re a real stand-up guy.” He tips his imaginary hat and smiles the greasy smile that Willow hates, but keeps polishing glasses. If he hears the sarcasm in her voice, he doesn’t acknowledge it.

“Quinn and Charon come out and of course all hell breaks loose, and in the middle of it all, Little Miss Smoothskin comes up the stairs like a deer dancing on ice. You pre-war folks know what I’m talking about, all ass over kettle. Her head’s smashed in, but she hangs on to her gun, just quiet as a mouse, shooting from the hip. That dog's hell on paws, tearing up mutie legs like a damn savage."

“Her bell’s rung _hard_ , and she comes crashing into Charon, convinced he’s some ghoul she knows. Calls him Gobbie and tells him-”

“The monsters are gonna eat me cause I’m a tiny human," says a small but clear voice.

Willow whips around to see the very subject of her story leaning in the doorway with a tired grin, looking like she should definitely be back in bed.

“Well, kid, you were some kind of something, that is a fact.” Willow says with a smile. “Now sit down before you fall down.”

 

**********

 

The child, (the only way Charon can describe this unlikely person) is sitting at the bar, cheerful, tiny, and completely unafraid - a bird too small to understand the enormity of the world it lives in. She sips her Nuka Cola like it is something new and interesting, and considering her youth, maybe it is. Her one hand is loose around the neck of the bottle, the slender fingers of the other absently playing with a torn corner of the label.

The dog is curled up at her feet, deceptively calm. While it lies quietly with its chin on its paws, Charon can see intelligent canine eyes darting around the room, seeking out threats both real and imagined.

Charon furtively stares at her, with the long, sweeping glances he uses to keep an eye on the bar, and she is easily the most interesting thing to come through this bar in months, maybe years. For her small size, she has a certain sturdiness about her, a roundness that is different from every other half starved Wasteland denizen. She looks - for lack of of a better word and setting aside the battle wounds - _healthy_. She wears what looks like a lightly armored janitor’s suit with a gigantic ‘101’ on the back in a yellow so bright, he is surprised no one has successfully used it as a target. That such a small creature has made it to the middle of mutant-infested DC with only a dog for a protector, is laughable at best. However, her boots are scuffed and the soles are flaking with dried blood.

She did not fly here, he reasons.

Turning her head, she glances at him, and he is momentarily shocked by the freckles on her skin. Nose, cheeks, forehead, chin, they are everywhere, spattering her dark skin like paint. Freckles aside, he still cannot understand it.

How did she _get_ here?

These are questions he really should have no interest in, but the lure of a puzzle in the face of such boredom is too great. He continues to stare at her, an unspoken dare for her to keep his gaze. She would scare off, and he would be left in peace.

To his immense surprise, she not only meets his stare, but returns it.

Unflinchingly.

She stands, an economical movement that still speaks of wooziness, and starts towards him, the dog at her side, as if that is the only place it could possibly exist.

He sees that his plan has backfired. Ahzrukhal has noticed too, but says nothing, because he finds it amusing. Charon wishes that he could find these encounters as hilarious as his employer does, but they only serve to remind him that he is worth next to nothing except to be the perfect thug.  

“Hello,” she says, voice soft. “I never got to thank you properly."

Charon can say nothing to this, so he does not try. Ahzrukhal had given him strict standing orders.

‘ _Stay the fuck quiet and send everyone to me.’_

This arrangement is usually fine with Charon. Then he is left alone to his thoughts and does not have to deal with people's foolishness. Her eyes are huge, and he can see a small thundercloud gathering at his silence.

“Not much for conversation, I take it.”

“Talk. To. Ahzrukhal.”

His voice comes out rough, rusty and unused even for a ghoul, like it had to tear its way out of his throat. He has a mad desire to clap his hands over his ears so he does not have to hear it grate.

But she does not talk to Ahzrukhal. She does not just want to poke the tight-leashed attack dog in the corner; she wants to have an actual conversation with it. Her eyes are full of turning gears and cogs, and they are looking at him like he is some sort of grand puzzle.

Charon does not like the way the tables have turned.

“Or maybe you're not allowed to talk to me.”

The muscles in his biceps leap as he squeezes his fists around what he imagines is Ahzrukhal’s throat. It is only mildly cathartic, and just enough to make the gears and cogs whir behind her eyes again. She is smart, this tiny bird, but his patience is wearing thin.

“Talk. To…”

“Yep, got it. Got it, got it, got it. Talking to Ahzrukhal.”

He lets out the breath he did not realize he had been holding, and its absence makes his lungs burn.

 

**********

 

They sit talking, heads bent together, her smiling a smile that is getting tighter and more pasted-on by the moment, and Ahzrukhal just looking hungry. Charon can hear bits and snatches of conversation, but not enough to understand what is being discussed.

“...doesn’t look that way…”

“I assure you…”

“...too steep.”

”...want the best, right?”

“...not stupid, you know.”

“Maybe you could…”

"...gonna happen."

"...the easy way."

“...NOT gonna happen.”

Charon watches them out of the corner of his eye. They seem to be at an impasse, bristled up and giving angry-cat glares. Surprisingly, Ahzrukhal breaks first, whatever she offered him apparently too good to pass up. She tosses a more than sizable bag of caps and a few odd looking Jet canisters on the bar, sweeping up the package Ahzrukhal had pulled out of his lapel.

“Pleasure doing business with you, Fuck-Face.”

Charon experiences a startling twinge of disappointment. He shuts his eyes to file away a mental picture of her alive and still breathing, a snapshot of something unique that will have a place in the world for only a few more moments. Remembering her alive is preferable to remembering her dead, and while brains spattered on the floor is usually a good memory, in this case, it would be...troubling.

Charon is under no illusions about the creature that he is. He is a silent beast of blood and death. A niggling itch in the back of his mind tells him what he does is deplorable, but is quickly buried by an overwhelming need to obey. It does not negate the disappointment, however. Something so rare and interesting is going to be struck down before its time. Ahzrukhal brooks no insult, and he will call Charon over to drag her out of Underworld and end her.

He has ended countless others, but this one would likely cause some struggle. Most he destroyed were just as disgusting as his employers. However, the percentage of dead and broken innocents he had left in his wake was still such that if hell were truly a destination, he would most certainly end up there.

The irony of rotting away in a bar called ‘The Ninth Circle’ situated in a city named ‘Underworld’ is not lost on him.

A light poke in his chest rips him from his reverie, and his hand flashes out of its own accord, catching the offending wrist in a vice-like grip. The bones grind together as he squeezes, but notices that they are much too small. He looks down, down, down, and the tiny bird smiles up at him through eyes welling with tears of pain.

“You probably shouldn’t do that to your employer,” she says softly.

He releases her wrist with a startled hiss.

Charon's whole world tips sideways as his brain tries desperately to comprehend what she is telling him. His fate, no matter how cruel, is to stand in the corner of this bar until the flesh falls off his bones or he goes feral.

It may not be right, and it may not be fair, but some things in this world just _are_.

“Employer?” he grinds out.

“Yeah, I bought your contract from Fuck-Face over there," she says, waving her uninjured hand vaguely in the direction of the bar.

He does not know if his brain is damaged or just willfully misunderstanding.

“Ahzrukhal sold you my contract. You are in possession of the document at this very moment.”

“Yeah, but to be honest, I don’t really-”

“So I am no longer in his employ. That is good to know.”

“Right, so-”

“Please excuse me, Mistress. There is something I must take care of. Immediately.”

She frowns but nods her head. “Alright, take your time,” she says, gingerly rubbing her injured wrist.

Charon had forgotten the freedom he always felt in the first few seconds as his contract changed hands. That moment when it sat on the table between two people, neither touching it, neither truly _owning_ it, and it was in a delicious state of limbo.

For that smallest bit of time, Charon was free.

But someone always put their hand on it, and the feeling burned out quickly as a dud fuse. He would follow his new employer to whatever meaningless, selfish, and stupid Wasteland endeavor they chose, as docile as a grotesque caricature of a gun-toting, death-dealing lamb can be.

This time though, this time is different. He has dreamt of this moment for almost twenty years and his new Mistress has given him permission to do it. Granted, it was a trick of semantics that a lawyer would be proud of, but Charon would have given his left eye for this.

And maybe he will have to.

Oh, everloving _fuck_ is he in trouble. Not even a literal minute of her becoming his employer, and he has already injured her. This does not bode well for his future. She is smart with her gears and cogs, and she will invent something inspiringly heinous to punish him with for his indiscretion. These thoughts and more are swirling in the tempest of chaos that comprises his brain, and he cannot make heads or tails of it, so he latches onto that flame of revenge that always burns so brightly.

“Come to say goodbye to your old employer, Charon?” Ahzrukhal’s voice is smooth and condescending, but the darting eyes and quickened breathing scream in silent terror.

Charon revels in it.

“Yes,” he hears himself say, softer than he would have thought, almost kindly.

Quick as thought, he draws his shotgun and blasts Ahzrukhal once, twice. A sense of calm washes over him in a heavy wave, sweeping the rest of the world away, and he notices _everything_.

The finely checkered handgrip beneath his fingers, the distinctive _blat_ of gunfire that only a shotgun loaded with combat slugs can produce, the rank yet oddly relaxing scent of burning cordite, the whir of the cycling ammunition drum, the delicate twin _tink_ of spent shells falling gracefully to the floor, the vibrant burst of red blood coloring an otherwise grey world as it pools underneath the most complete piece of shit Charon has ever had the misfortune of laying eyes on.

It all paints a masterpiece so achingly beautiful, it would make a less stoic being want to cry.

As he goes to shoot the body again, just for old time’s sake, he feels a light but firm grip on the back of his arm.

“I think you’ve made your point,” his Mistress says behind him. Her voice is quiet, but she does not sound pleased. Indeed, the bar has erupted into chaos, chairs and tables overturned, patrons either fleeing for their lives or staring in abject horror.

_“He killed Ahzrukhal!”_

_‘Oh my god, he just shot him!”_

_“Did she tell him to?”_

_“What if she tells him to kill us all?”_

Charon had not thought this through, at all. Each waking hour was spent daydreaming about how he would kill Ahzrukhal, not what would happen afterward. But maybe her punishment will finally kill him.

While not a particularly honorable thought, it is at least an honest one.

The bag is still on the counter, bulging with the caps that had once again bought the right to his contract, and her stare follows his.

“No good,” she says in answer, “it's got blood on it.”

And she is right, in more ways than one. The whole counter and bag is dotted with a fine mist of red. But maybe she should take it. It is paid for at least twice over with Ahzrukhal’s blood. She does not seem to agree. Her eyes are narrowed and she looks, well, _pissed_. She crooks her finger at the dog, who has stayed by her side the whole time, like a good shadow.

Like he should have.

“You’d better come, too. We have a few things to hash out.” Spinning on her heel, she marches through the doors, Charon and the dog right behind her.

However, despite how angry as she is, and how much trouble he is probably in, he feels something spreading out in his chest, something he has not felt for over a century. It curls its sharp little fingers and latches on, and it is lovely in its heat.

 

Happiness truly can be found in a warm gun, especially when it is pointed in the right direction.

 


	8. And So We Exist in a State of Vague Unease

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration brought to you by:
> 
> Veloma - Fabrizio Paterlini
> 
> The Gift - Joep Beving
> 
> Bright Lights - Martin Jacoby
> 
> Ten Sleep - High Plains

“Just what the hell were you thinking?!” she snaps as he closes the door behind him.

Charon growls softly at the tone of her voice. Ahzrukhal badly needed killing, but her injured wrist is tucked up by her stomach, and then there is the small fortune she had left behind like it had meant nothing. This is a tangle of thoughts and emotions snaking around his head that he has no desire to sort out. However, it is apparent that she wants an answer, and she wants it now.

“Ahzrukhal was an evil-”

“You could have been hurt!”

Charon has not been so confused since he can remember.

“Hurt?”

“Yes, hurt! Stormed in there like the wrath of God, no back up, like a damn fool...”

“I do not under-”

“Mind your own _fucking_ business!” she yells at a knot of whispering, eavesdropping citizens who take one look at her face and flee. She rounds on Charon, surprisingly angry for all her tiny-ness. “He had a pistol, you know. Pointed at you from his pocket!”

Charon wants to laugh. Ahzrukhal had hidden behind him for decades. Not even in his wildest dreams was Ahzrukhal a match for Charon in anything.

“A 10mm, at best,” Charon says before he thinks, and knows the comment smacks of insubordination and he can only wonder at his own stupidity.

“And a 10mm between the eyes is still dead! Listen, are you going to kill me too? Because I do _not_ need this shit!”

She looks livid, dark spots splotching underneath her freckles.

"I would not have-"

"You could have been hurt!" she repeats, as if he is too slow to have understood her the first time.

Charon decides it would be tactically sound to remain silent. He will be forced to explain the contract and all its many stipulations, but she does not seem receptive to much of anything right now. She is off and pacing, too worked up to sit still, flapping her uninjured arm in frustration like some wounded bird that could not quite take flight.

“This is the only place besides Megaton I actually _enjoy_ being, and now everyone thinks I’m a bloodthirsty bag of dicks, and I'm hungry, and _goddamn_ it, my head hurts!”

She stops and stares at him, shakes her head and gives a long-suffering sigh. “Listen, I’m not heartbroken he’s dead. Good fucking riddance, I say.”

Charon stares at her in turn, at a loss as to just what sort of creature his contract has been passed on to.

“Oh, nevermind, we can talk about it later. I’m going to Carol’s to get something to eat. You coming?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

 

**********

 

“Hey, Carol!” she calls out as they walk through the door. It is apparent that they are on good terms.

“Hello, darling! It’s good to see-” Carol puts a hand over her chest and lets out a soft little scream, as if she had seen a mouse. Charon can not blame her. He does not have the most peaceful of histories in this city.

“It’s okay, Carol."

Apparently, it is not, because she is holding herself like a skittish deer, ready to bolt at the slightest sign of aggression.

"He's  _dangerous_!" she hisses. "The things he's done-"

His Mistress takes Carol's hands, bringing the bird-flutter to something more still. 

"It's okay."

The things Charon has done are decidedly  _not_ 'okay', and he would rather his Mistress know nothing about them. 

Carol sees both that his Mistress is relaxed and Charon has not murdered anyone yet, and decides to accept what she says at face value. 

"You're taking care of her?" Carol asks, eyes on his face now, perhaps made bold because she is not dead on the floor yet. "You'll keep her safe?"

Charon crosses his arms and nods, because that is, in fact, the terms of his contract. 

"Well, it's good to see you out of that bar."

He, too, is glad to be out of the bar, but only time will tell if it will be better in the long run, so he says nothing.

“Man of few words, I see,” says Carol, and she actually _smiles_ at him, the same warm smile she gives to his Mistress. “Anyhoo, what would you two like to eat?”

“Mirelurk cakes and apples if you have them. What sounds good, big guy?"

“Whatever you think is best,” he manages, and thankfully, she does not press.

“Well, alright. Carol, maybe pick out something you think he’ll like, and a lot of it, please.”

“Coming right up. Greta will be out with your drinks.”

His Mistress sits at a table with the dog under her feet, and motions for him to do the same.

Interesting, but mostly ridiculous. He cannot guard her nearly as effectively while sitting down, but positions himself with his back to the wall where he has a view of the restaurant in its entirety. He hears Greta approach, and his Mistress tenses for the briefest of moments. While he does not allow any tension to bleed through to his own body language, he is ready for confrontation nonetheless.

“So, smoothskin, you got yourself another dog? One just wasn’t enough?”

”Greta," his Mistress says in a singsong voice, "this is a bad idea."

“What, you gonna sic your new dog on me?”

His Mistress smiles, and her white teeth flash sharp. “Oh, honey. I don't need to.” Making a show of crossing her legs, she pulls a large combat knife from her boot and gently sets it on the table, like it might be just another spoon or fork. It has ‘Stabhappy’ engraved on the folded steel and Charon can only wonder where she obtained it. It is the type of weapon people might fight and kill over. But as soft and spoiled as his new Mistress must be, she could not have taken it from someone by force. And remembering the big bag of caps she had abandoned without a backwards glance, Charon decides she had simply purchased it.

Greta’s eyes grow wide, looking at the blued blade of the knife, but Charon has to give her credit because she covers her terror with a sneer.

“You wouldn’t dare.”

The smoothskin leans forward, chin resting on a fist. "Wanna fuck with me and find out?"

“You don’t scare me.”

His Mistress laughs a laugh that sounds like jangling bells. “You’re stupid, then. I know what you did to him, Greta. Maybe Carol should know, too.”

Greta slams the Nuka-Colas down and flounces off.

“Goddamn it, now it’s gonna be all foamy,” his Mistress gripes, tapping the top with a surprisingly clean fingernail to get the bubbles to go down. “Totally worth it, though.” She grins, and it is like the sharp teeth were never there at all. “Greta’s almost harmless, but she’s been a pain in my ass ever since I got here.”

His Mistress sighs and looks heavenward, as if praying for patience. “Did you know Fuck-Face wanted me to kill her in exchange for your contract? He propositioned me, too! Said I had pretty eyes!” she says with a snort of derision.

“Mistress, -”

“My name's not 'mistress'!” she snaps with a venomous emphasis on the title.  She glances up just in time to see him tense, and her eyes are immediately soft as she almost looks ashamed. “I’m sorry, I get cranky when I’m hungry.”

“What do you wish I should call you?”

She sighs and leans back in her chair. “Well, right now, you could call me ‘jackass’ and you wouldn’t be wrong.”

She contemplates the bottle of Nuka-Cola as if weighing the probability of being soaked with foam if she opens it.

“Gobbie calls me ‘Lucky’ because I didn’t order a drink with piss in it.”

While he knows it is supposed to be a joke, the urge to bury his head in his hands is very strong. He is a weapon made flesh, not a companion to be conversated with.

“Listen, things are going to be weird for a minute, but I think it'll be alright after we get all this hashed out. You call me whatever you’re comfortable with.”

There is nothing to ‘hash out’. She is his employer and he is her employee. Charon simply wants to be left alone and fulfill his function in peace.

“I would call you Mistress.”

Mistress is best. It is clean and without attachment.

Empty.

She sighs. It is apparent that this is not what she wished for. “Whatever makes you happy, I guess.”

Happy.

As if that is an emotion Charon can even have. Pride in a particularly good shot, the rare comfort of a full stomach, a few moments of relaxation before an hour or two of sleep, the automatic release of endorphins in response to battle - none of it equates to _happiness._ Even the phrase ‘happiness is a warm gun’ is not quite right. It should be ‘satisfaction’ or ‘contentedness’.

She tries to pop the top off her Nuka Cola only using one hand, with less than satisfactory results. A dark, hand-shaped bruise is beginning to form around her wrist and he internally cringes to know that he is the reason she cannot use two hands to open a bottle of soda.

“I have already failed.”

She looks at him as if he has sprouted two heads like a brahmin.

“Huh?”

“I have injured you,” he says quietly. “You are entitled to retaliation.”

“Nah, it’s fine.”

She delays his punishment, then. How irritating. It would be more convenient to get it out of the way and move on. But perhaps even as smart as she is, she needs more time to cook something up.

“Very well. I will wait.”

“For what? It was just an accident,” she says, flapping her uninjured hand like a seven-foot-three monster crushing her wrist might be the most inconsequential thing to happen to her today. “Hey, can you open this?”

He wordlessly takes it from her and levers the cap with one of the many buckles on his armor, and his head is flooded with one of those terrible memories, that while rare, causes an inversely proportionate amount of pain.

 

_She sits at the kitchen table, laughing at her own weakness, like it doesn’t matter to her in the slightest, and maybe it really doesn’t. She’s got him around to open bottles for her, after all. He pops the top and she laughs again, a soft, silvery sound, and he drowns in it._

 

Charon holds the bottle out, frozen as the memory takes hold and blocks out almost everything else. If she notices, she says nothing.

“Thanks,” she says, taking the bottle from him and the spell is broken. He shakes his head minutely to clear away whatever it was that had torn a hole in him.

“Anyway,” she yammers on, “just what, exactly, have I purchased?”

Taking a sip of soda, she sighs in appreciation, and he watches her throat move delicately as she swallows. It is impossible that such a small thing should be able to rule over him with an iron fist gloved in velvet fingers, but it is true nonetheless.

“Fuck-Face, God rest his _weary_ soul, amen _,_ ” she crosses herself and grins when Charon produces a strangled sound in between a choke and and snort, “was less than forthcoming with the details.”

But before he can explain his contract, Carol comes over with two large plates and a wide smile. “Mirelurk cakes and apples for the lady,” she says, and his Mistress lets out a little wiggle of happiness at the plate set before her.

“And for the gentleman, a side of Mac n’ Cheese, and two brahmin steaks on the live side of medium rare.”

His Mistress looks at her in question, but Carol just laughs.

“Sometimes a man just needs a good steak.”

 

**********

 

They sit at a table in Carol’s restaurant, like a pair of normal, everyday people, her eating a mirelurk cake and mooning over the apples, while he is faced with two beautifully cooked steaks. He has not eaten in almost a week, but they are sticking in his throat. The fork and knife feel odd in his hands. Usually, he eats whatever is thrown at him with his fingers. But he dutifully keeps swallowing, because who knows when food will come around again.

He thought she would want to talk about the contract, to pry all the useful bits of information out that she could use to her advantage, but no. His Mistress talks to him about this, that, the other, and everything else under the sun, seemingly unfazed that it is a completely one-sided conversation.

He is suffering and she is oblivious.

 

**********

 

"So, about this contract,” she finally says. “All the words are worn away."

Sweeping away any crumbs off the table with her sleeve, she unfolds his contract carefully, turning it this way and that in a fruitless attempt to read it. “What does it say?”

It is a small thing, thin and compact, and its words are spare and all-encompassing and not one is wasted. Charon knows its contents like a mantra. He can break it down into each vowel, consonant, and character, take them all, and build them back up to syllables, words, and phrases - sharp, clear, and precise.

The document itself is old, but written on a woven blend of cotton, linen, and silk, the strongest and most durable of its day. However, two centuries of wear will weather even the toughest of materials, and only his name and a few symbols are recognizable. Lying to his employer, however, is impossible. Charon had tried it a few times, but found it to be a titanic task he is just not strong enough for.

Some mountains are simply immovable, especially by mere men.

“I am yours to command, however you will. I follow you for good or for ill, unless you go where I cannot follow. All I possess, material or immaterial, is yours. I am your weapon and your shield, and I protect your life with my life until one of us is dead, or this document is transferred to another. So long as you hold the contract, you may fear no harm from myself, but physical violence on your part invalidates ownership of the contract.”

She stares at him as if _all_ his skin has fallen off.

“Oh my God, I just got married.”

He had never thought of it that way before, but then again, his employer had never been a woman.

“So, what's all this about ‘retaliation’? I don’t think I like that.”

Charon does not like that particular clause either. It tends to range from simply irritating to excruciating. But he knows why his contract contains it. It is his incentive to always do the best he is able. Without consequences, he would grow soft and weak.

At least, that is how Charon has decided to rationalize it.

“I have injured you. That is in direct violation of the contract. Punishment is...expected.”

She blinks at him like she has just woken up from a particularly ludicrous dream. “Um, yeah. Fuck that. Anyway, moving on.”

Charon chokes out a less than convincing ‘very well’, because this new employer is becoming too strange for words.

“I can sell it to whoever I want?” He can see the gears and cogs again, and Charon's chest tightens. To go from one employer to another was one thing, but for his contract to be sold so quickly; that had not happened in decades. Perhaps she prefers to recoup the caps left on the bar from a source less bloody. He wants to remain silent, but she has asked him a question, and all questions must be answered.

‘Yes.”

Her face brightens considerably. “Oh, thank god. Hold out your hand.” He grumbles but obeys. She presses the bottle cap from her soda into his hand and he almost jumps at the shock of her touch when she curls his fingers around it. “See, now I’ll sell it to you for one cap, ok?” She holds out her hand, palm up, obviously expecting the cap back.

She is looking inordinately pleased with herself.

“No.”

Her face goes blank. “No?” Her hand stays outstretched, as if not believing her ears.

“No. I cannot buy my own contract.”

The hand sinks back to the table. “Sooo, I can’t sell it to you, fine. Can I just give it back to you?” Her eyes and shoulders are scrunched up, concerned and more than a little frightened.

“No.”

“You know that doesn’t make any sense, right?”

“Perhaps not to you, but I cannot be without a contract-holder. I can only give it to the next person that will take it out of my hands, whomever that may be. I do not...function well...alone.”

If left proper standing orders when abandoned, he can care for himself, but he thinks his contract was never meant to be used as it has been. He had been, he thinks, an invaluable, priceless tool, meant to safeguard heads of state, to turn the tides of battles and wars, to shape the history of whole nations with blood and death. _Not_ to follow molasses-brained Wastelanders around like an overgrown golem.

But she looks very scared now. “You’re telling me, the only way to get rid of you is to sell you to someone else."

That was not entirely accurate; it was not him she would be selling, but his contract. However, she does have a point, as the two are inseparable.

"Yes.”

“Goddamn it." The gears and cogs are turning at a furious pace. "What if I tear it up?" She is holding it up to the light, looking at the watermark that ensures it cannot be forged. But the way she is holding it, a corner in each tiny hand, she could tear it in two before he could come across the table after her. Her knuckles flex slightly as her fingertips test the strength of the paper.

Charon cannot breathe. His lungs have stopped working. The cap is still in his hand, and its crimped edges bite into his palm as he squeezes his fist until the knuckles softly pop. He finally finds his voice, but only because he has to.

"I would be compelled to destroy you."  

He does not add that he would likely destroy himself right after. He cannot function without a contract-holder, and if there is no contract to be held…Maybe it is better if she rips it up into tiny pieces right then and there. At least then it would all be over.

So to say Charon is disgusted with that tiny flame in his chest, that unreasonable spark of eternal hope that demands he at least make an effort to live, is a gross understatement.

She quirks an eyebrow, but whether in surprise at his admission or skepticality of his ability to kill her, he is not sure. Maybe it is in the way he is almost panting with a stress he has never felt, or maybe she sees that ridiculous will to live written on his face. Either way, her eyes soften, and she gently places his contract on the table. Light fingertips to delicately trace the creases, trying to get two centuries of wrinkles out, and they smooth out some of his panic with them.

She whips her gaze up, and her odd, light eyes pierce his with an intensity and sadness that he does not expect. They are grey - seas and storms and water-worn stones. "If someone else gets a hold of this, and they tell you to kill me, you'll do it, won't you."

It is not a question, but a statement.

"Yes."

The eyes finally leave his, and he feels himself relax infinitesimally when they stop pinning him to the opposite wall with their weight. Quietly, she thinks some more, but following the faded characters with her fingers. "This is your name?" she asks, tracing the smattering of letters along the bottom.

"Yes."

“And this. This spot here. Is that...blood?”

She points to the thumbprint next to his name. His own unique seal of captivity, of servitude. The ridges on the paper do not match his own anymore. Seven of his fingers have fingerprints left, but the thumb of his right hand is not one of them.

“Yes.”

“Holy fuck. Is it yours?” She traces around it, not daring to put her own finger over the ghost of his, and he wonders why.

“Yes.”

Visibly shaking herself, she pastes on a smile. "Well, I'll just have to keep it safe.” She carefully folds it up small and stashes it in a tiny pocket on her armored jumpsuit he had not noticed before.

"Need to think of something," she says, everything around her caught up and pushed aside in the wake of her thoughts.

 

**********

 

“Carol, do you have a room with two beds? Or two rooms, each with a bed? Or a room with a bed and a comfy pull-out couch?”

“Oh, dear. I’ve only got one room open, and it has one queen sized bed.” Carol wrings her hands and looks genuinely worried at the prospect of her lamb staying in the same room as a monster. Charon does not grudge her that, but wants to snort at the absurdity of it. His Mistress is in no danger from him now, certainly less than she had been when she first traipsed through the double doors of the Ninth Circle.

“Looks like things might be a little cramped, big guy,” she grouses.

“I am used to sleeping on the floor.”

His Mistress looks positively wrathful, but he gets the feeling that the object of her ire is more existential than himself. She pays Carol, kisses her goodnight on the cheek, and sashays to her newly rented room like a ship in full sail, Charon and the dog in her wake.

His Mistress has kissed a ghoul. Actually put her lips on a ghoul’s cheek, and smiled when she did it.

And while he had thought he had seen all the things in this world that were there to be seen, Charon decides it may still hold fresh wonders to be discovered.

 

**********

 

“I will take watch.”

She puts her hands on her hips and her eyes flash dangerous. “The fuck you will. You need sleep.”

Perhaps she is concerned he will be less effective in battle, and it is true. He does perform better with sleep, but it is not essential. He can go exactly a week and four days on three hours before it begins to negatively impact his effectiveness. Charon wonders if this is peculiar to himself as an individual, or simply a byproduct of his training.

“I do not require it.”

“Well, I require it of you,” she says cheekily.

Charon crosses his arms and simply stares at her because he is not sure what else to do. No one had ever demanded he go to sleep. Shoot people and shut the fuck up while he did it, yes, but never to sleep.

"Don't you give me that look. At least lay down. You're making me nervous, standing there all big and _loom-y_." She pats the bed next to her and he warily sits as commanded, keeping an ocean of space between them.

“For fucksake, I’m not gonna _molest_ you. What do you think I am, some kind of perv?”

What she is, Charon does not know, and he would honestly rather never find out.

“Just relax, okay?”

He does not, because he cannot.

“It’s safe here,” she says, laying back and wriggling into the pillows and under the blanket.

Nowhere is safe and she is foolish to think so. However, she has told him to lay down, so he does, but not before stowing his shotgun under the bed so it is ready within and moment’s notice. He wonders how she can be so calm sleeping in the same bed as a monster, how she could be so naive to let an absolute stranger who is easily twice her size and likely three or four times her strength have her in such a dangerous position.

The dog wags its tail and yawns in his face with a mouth full of sharp teeth and Charon supposes he has his answer, no matter how idiotic it may be.

She has put out all the lights, and only her computer glows, illuminating her face in a wash of green that makes her look slightly ill, but she is flipping and flopping to get comfortable, and as she thrashes, the room is painted with crazily shifting light and shadow. In a moment of darkness, a heavy, wriggling weight he can only assume is the dog lands squarely between them, and Charon discovers this is the first time he has ever been glad of a dog before.

“Move over, floof-butt!” she says huffily.

“Are you speaking to me or the dog?”

“I don’t know, but somebody's digging something sharp into my ribs. I got stabbed there, you know.”

“Are you injured?”

“I’m fine. That was a month ago or something. Maybe longer. Who knows.”

“I can sleep on the floor.”

“No, no, it’s not you, Dogmeat’s being Mama’s little pain in the ass, aren’t you, baby-dog? Now, move your furry butt over,” she grunts as she hauls the dog to her feet. Charon's own feet are currently hanging off the end of bed. Unless he laid diagonally, there is no bed in all the Wasteland large enough to comfortably accommodate over seven feet of ghoul.

“There. Much better, yes?”

“If you say so.”

“I do,” she says with a snort of laughter _._ “We probably should have said that when I took over your contract. You can’t really be married until you say ‘I do’.”

He does not dare dignify that with a response.

She switches off the greenish light on her little computer and sighs a ‘goodnight’ into the new dark.

It shoots a pain right through the center of his chest.

 

_She turns out the light, and lets out a sigh. When he asks her what’s wrong, she says ‘nothing,’ but all he can hear is, ‘everything.’_

 

**********

 

His Mistress never actually commanded him to lay _here_ , and Charon cannot stand it anymore. The bed is soft enough to be unbearable. He slithers out silently and looks over to be sure he has not woken her.

She is so small lying there, yet she seems to take up the whole bed. Her mouth is slightly open, and a few strands of dark hair flutter with her even breathing. The curly mop is everywhere, escaping off the pillow, into her mouth, sticking out every which-way. Her good arm is flung across the dog, who had somehow wormed his way back up between them, while the bad one, the one that he had injured, is protectively tucked underneath her. Her legs have twisted in the blanket, and her bare toes peek out. The tiny toenails had been painted a brilliant red once, but it has chipped off all but the two big ones. Charon thinks it is just one more vanity the Wasteland has swallowed up.

But she seems to have held on to a few. Even cut to a little lower than the nape of her neck, the corkscrew curls are much too long and thick to be practical - almost an explosion of them, in fact - but she had patiently combed them with her fingers before going to bed.

Then she had _brushed her teeth._

No one brushes their teeth. It is why almost no one has a full and complete set. But she had put a bit of baking soda on her ludicrous red toothbrush and had just brushed away as if the world had not even ended. However, each movement was a measured motion that spoke of a habit so deeply ingrained it might as well have been written on her bones.

_Scrub, scrub, scrub, counter-clockwise - top left, bottom left, top right, bottom right_

The motions were almost maddening in their regularity. She had finally spit it out, rinsed, and run her pink tongue across each pearl tooth, as if reassuring herself that each was in its correct place.

His Mistress is an enigma, and Charon does not like these kind of puzzles.

But what Charon is really concerned about is the frequency of memories that have surfaced lately. He had not had one in almost a century, so two in the same day is unprecedented. To be perfectly honest, he is not even sure the memories are his own, but he does know that they feel as real as memories possibly could.

They are disjointed and chaotic, snippets of another person, another life. There is no context or point of reference, and the triggers seem to have nothing in common. Sometimes it was a sight, a smell, or a taste. Other times, a situation, a face, or a phrase, but it was always like deja vu. He wishes he could understand, and wishes even more for them to stop.

Charon had learned long ago not to wish for things that were out of his reach; abstract things, like freedom, hope, or happiness. Once you stopped wanting things you cannot have, you could move on with your life, or whatever was left of it.

  
An employer like her was too good to be true. Something had to be wrong, he just had not run across it yet.


	9. Insanity Is A Catching Disease

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration brought to you by:
> 
> aisatsana [102] - Aphex Twin
> 
> Streets - Clem Leek
> 
> Travelling - James Spiteri
> 
> Airam - Nil Ciuro
> 
> Written On the Sky - Max Richter
> 
> Danse - Dirk Maassen
> 
> Rays of Hope - Oneke

The morning passes into afternoon, and still she sleeps. Charon has no choice but to sit quietly and check his minimal equipment. His armor is falling apart, but he doggedly attempts to repair that, too. It is all he has. Ahzrukhal did not equip him properly, so Charon has used whatever scraps he found when out on ‘errands’ - usually spent beating the life and caps out of people.

His Mistress sleeps soundly, yet not at all. Somewhere in the night, she has nightmares that she simply does not wake from. Oh, there is no screaming or thrashing - nothing so dramatic as all that - but soft whimpers punctuated by twitches and sharp gasps, her eyes screwed up tight and jaw clenched hard enough to creak. Charon can recognize them for what they are - the signs of a mind bending precariously under the weight of a world gone sick and sour.

But everyone dreams.

She finally wakes, hair sticking up like a bomb had went off and voice muzzy with sleep still on its edges.

“Morning.”

He simply grunts, because it is not morning at all. He cannot fathom how she could sleep the day away. Carol’s hotel is as safe as any place can be in the Wasteland, but a heavy sleeper usually ends up dead.

But as he methodically continues to clean and re-assemble his shotgun in exactly the same order of mindless motions as he has in two centuries of memory, he is reminded that his habits may be written on his own bones as well.

“Hey,” she says, laying on her stomach with her chin in her hands, kicking one leg in the air. The pant leg falls down to her knee and while the ankle is thin and bony, the calf swells with muscle, like a runner or a dancer. She looks at him intently, searchingly, and he tries his best to ignore her. “So, Fuck-Face said you were brainwashed when you were a kid. Is that true?”

“Ahzrukhal said many things. Most were false.”

“Oh. Well, I’ve been thinking, dreaming really. Is there any way to fix you?”

Fix him. As if he might have a bent firing pin or a catch in his slide. 

“No,” he growls out, and hopes she leaves it.

She does not.

“But, I mean, how did you get this way?”

Charon hates these memories. They are not like the ones from last night, unknown and unexpected. The memories of the methods used are hazy and indistinct, but the pain and their final lessons, those are indelibly burned into his skull.

“My creators would know, but they are long dead.”

The voice in which he tells her must have enough forbidding ice on it, because she finally leaves it. But the gears and cogs tell him that she is far from dropping the subject completely.

She brushes her teeth. 

***********

Charon finds out what is wrong with his Mistress. 

She is insane.

But no. No, a simple garden variety insanity - maybe one with a nice, even-keeled disorder and a few innocuous phobias or manias thrown in for flavor - is not enough for someone like her.

She prefers unequivocally, absolutely, and positively bat-shit insane.

Charon deals with the insanity of his employers and views it as a necessary part of his servitude. He has become adept at managing it, not for his employers’ safety, but his own, and could probably write a book about all the little tics and madnesses a human can have. This one, he had thought he might be able to manage, but now he is not so sure.

She goes back to Barrows to say thank you for putting her skull back together, but ends up debating with him about how to ‘fix’ Charon.

Charon does not need ‘fixed’. Charon is what he is, and he does not need someone poking around in his brain. Both she and the doctor ignore him, but he is silent, so he cannot really blame them.

“Lucky, before we get into all that, there's something you should know. About ghouls.”

“Okay?”

Doc Barrows pinches the spot above where his nose used to be, like he has a headache. “You know that ghouls can go feral. But it's what  _ makes _ them go feral that you need to watch out for.”

He has captured her full attention, and the gears and cogs are turning at an astounding pace.

“Too much radiation, for one. Especially big spikes or prolonged exposure. It heals us, but too much makes us unstable. It’s like we overdose on it.”

She nods her head solemnly. “Every medicine can be a poison,” she recites, and Charon can tell the words are not her own.

“Exactly. I’ve come to the conclusion that the human mind is not meant to operate for hundreds of years. Ghouls need more socialization than the average human. We get depressed and if we stay isolated too long…”

“A psychotic break,” his Mistress says sagely, and Charon thinks she would know, as she seems to live in a constant one.

“Yes! You don’t know how  _ nice _ it is to talk to someone on the same level! Anyway, it's a cyclical problem. Depression causes isolation, isolation causes more depression, until they...well, until they slip under, I guess.”

“So how do you stop it?”

“It's different for each person. I have my work to focus on. I’ve lasted over a hundred years that way. Carol has her hotel to run, and you know how old she is. Winthrop solves puzzles all day keeping this place running. Quinn trades, Willow tells stories. So, we keep ourselves busy. Keep our minds sharp and working.”

“What about Patchwork?” his Mistress says, eyes anxious and searching.

Charon knows the answer before Barrows even speaks, and it is a grim one. Patchwork was always a mess, but Charon had seen him decline at a surprising rate. Ahzrukhal was especially cruel, commanding Charon to not only toss him down the stairs or over the railing, but to pull pieces off as punishment for an unpaid bar tab.

“He’s...well, to be honest, he's on his way down. A couple more years, maybe. Willow knows. She promised to be kind.”

“So, basically, you need a purpose. Something to live for. And not to get blasted with radiation.”

“Precisely.”

“So, what do you think about Charon?” she asks the doctor expectantly.

Barrows scratches his skinless chin. “Well, I'll tell you one thing. There’s no way a brain stays brainwashed for two hundred years without constant reinforcement.”

She looks excited, bouncing on the balls of her tiny feet. “So there’s something in there! Something we could take out!”

“Lucky, no. I’m not that good a surgeon.”

“You fixed my head!” His Mistress argues.

Barrows sighs with exasperation. “We have no idea what part of the brain it’s in. And even if we did, taking it out could kill him. Hell, it might be the only thing keeping him sane.”

Not one to be discouraged, she bends her mind to the problem, and if they had not been talking about cutting open his brain, it would have been fascinating to watch the gears turn.

“Maybe we don’t have to take it out. Maybe we could just turn it off.” 

“Now you’re talking about major bioengineering and computer programming, which I have no experience in.” 

“But there has to be something we can do!”

Charon has never heard such a useless fuss in his entire existence. All this trouble for a weapon that happens to breathe is ridiculous. Barrows raises his hands as if to stave off the onslaught of optimism, and Charon understands, because he feels like he might be buried alive in it. “Let’s take a couple x-rays, just to see. If Charon doesn’t mind, that is.”

His Mistress does not order him to get his head looked at. She does not ask with words, but the brightness of hope and concern blooming in her tiny face as she tips it up to look into his is blinding, and Charon finds that he does indeed, not mind. He supposes he has gone through almost all those stages of grief about his condition.

In the early days, there had been denial, where he had walked around a bit shell-shocked and, he thinks, more mindless than his creators had probably wanted. Anger had come next, when he had tried to disobey each and every order, and so the penchant for discovering loopholes was born. He had skipped over the bargaining because that was just silly. A little depression, more like a general malaise and listlessness where silence became the order of the day and had stuck even until now, and finally, an acceptance so profound it now bordered on apathy.

Charon supposes he just does not care on a few different levels.

“Do as you will.” 

“Only if you want to,” she says. “It’s your choice.” 

Those are three words he had never heard spoken to him before, and it is disconcerting. He does not trust himself to speak, so simply nods his head.

**********

It is painless, Barrows is kind, his Mistress is anxious, and Charon wants to hit something.

He has no idea how to swim in this ocean of concern for himself. It is weakness to care, to hope - and he is furious for being so pitiful.

But as he stares at the lightbox with its images of his skull plastered all over it, he is awestruck. He has hardly any medical training whatsoever, just enough to keep himself alive, and even he can see something in there that does not belong.

“Holy shit,” his Mistress says, and it is an accurate sentiment.

The small, round disc that is at the base of his skull is not terribly alarming. What is alarming is the spiderweb of wires attached to it, seeming to wind their way into every bit of his brain.

“Charon?” Barrows says quietly, turning to him, actually talking to him directly instead of his employer, and he exhales in a woosh. “I’m sorry. I truly am. But that’s not coming out. Ever.”

Charon is not angry with Barrows. The few times Charon had come back from an errand too torn up to function, Ahzrukhal had grudgingly sent him to to the clinic. Barrows had patched him up with gentle hands and and softly spoken admonishments to be more careful. However, he had also worked without any payment except Ahzrukhal not setting Charon on him like a rabid dog.

“What if you snip the wires? Take out the core processor-”

“Lucky, you just have to accept it!” Barrows says with some heat, and then they are arguing, and Charon simply cannot stand it anymore.

“Enough,” Charon hears himself say.

They both stare at him.

“It is enough.” 

And it is. Charon does not think he would know what to do with freedom even if he got it. He would likely go berserk, like a turret with a hacked tracking system. And these wires and chips are almost comforting in a way. They say that his crushing need to follow orders is not a personal weakness, but simply an inevitability.

But his Mistress is crying. Not the sniffling, honking kind. This is the silent kind that has all its emotions finely distilled into leaking salt water.

Charon is making a mental list of her madnesses, and adds this to the 'bat-shit insane' column.

**********

Perhaps she felt cheated, not to be able to climb into Charon’s brain and fix something. So to ensure the visit is fruitful, she shoots up some poor coma patient with enough drugs to kill a brahmin.

“Lucky, I put her in a coma for a reason,” Barrows says testily.

“And it’s a very  _ nice  _ coma. Real squishy.”

“If you wake her up, she could be nothing more than a drooling husk.”

“Maybe, but if that Med-X drip you've got her on runs much longer, she’ll be a drooling, Med-X-fiendy-husk.”

Barrows grumps at her. “Damned if you do…”

“Trust me,” she says with her white smile and Barrows cannot help but do exactly that. She looks over her new patient, clucking over some things, but mostly complimenting Barrows on the quality of his work.

“Is there radscorpion venom in here?!,” she asks with a grin, turning the drip over in her hands and looking at its neon yellow color. “You sly dog! No wonder she's so still!”

Barrows preens at the praise. “Best muscle relaxant out here, but how are you going to wake her up?”

“Cocktail!” she says chirpily, tearing apart various medicine delivery systems to get to the drugs inside. “I mean, a nice hit of naloxone would be ten thousand percent better, but, you know…” she sweeps her hand out palm up, in an all-encompassing gesture, “wasteland.” 

She talks as she works and it reads like a soup recipe. “Psycho to jack up the sympathetic nervous system,” she says, adding pinches and drops of medicines into a steel bowl and carefully crushing it into a fine powder with the round surface of a cue ball that she had viciously scrubbed with bleach. “But not too much or we’ll send her into cardiac arrest. That venom is going to have to work itself out, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Mentats to reverse the Med-X drip. Good job, by the way, she’s out like a light.” 

“What are you doing to mitigate shock?” Barrows says, nodding right along as if she is not speaking a foreign language.

“Stimpak directly after infusion. Please tell me you have saline and tubing. I’m worried this will infiltrate without a carrier fluid.” 

Barrows grins. “I’ve got better. Dextrose. Made it myself. Should help cushion the shock nicely.” 

His Mistress injects the paste she has made into the bag of fluid, doing a ridiculous dance to shake the bag and mix the contents. 

“Shake, shake, shake, Senora,” she sings, prancing and moving her hips and upper body independently of each other, “shake it all the time!”

“Work, work, work, Senora, work your body line!” She shimmies, the dog dances on its hind legs, Nurse Graves claps out a beat,Barrows snorts at her antics, and Charon stands there wondering if he has stumbled upon some new alternate universe of madness. The bag mixed, she sobers and prepares to slide a new needle into the woman’s other arm. 

Barrows laughs at her thoroughness. “You're too picky,” he says as she scrubs at the crook of the woman’s arm with the sharp-smelling liquid that she had dug up from her pack. “You won't have time to do that in the field.”

She sticks her tongue out at him like a child. “Sepsis is a hell of a thing, Doc. And in case you haven't noticed, the whole world has turned into one big, antibiotic-resistant infection.”

“Bacteremia.”

“Gangrene.”

“Necrotizing fasciitis.”

“Oooo, good one!”

“I read books,” he says. “Stop already! If you keep scrubbing, she won't have any skin left to necrotize!”

His Mistress shoots him a dirty look but deftly slides the new needle in. “Here we go…” she says, letting the pinkish-yellow fluid leak into a few drips at the end of the tubing before she connects it and lets it run.

A few minutes later, the woman gasps, coming up out of the bed like it is made of fire. “Brick! Donovan! Oh god, Theo!”

“Lay still!” His Mistress commands, and her voice is like the crack of a whip. It holds so much steel, the woman obeys immediately. Charon is surprised to feel himself go still too.

She doses her patient with a stimpak, murmuring apologies as she strikes right behind the ear. The woman remains still, but her eyes are darting in fear.

“Please! My team. Someone has to help them!” 

Charon sighs as his Mistress fervently promises to help and wonders if rotting away in a boring bar might be preferable to being owned by a bat-shit insane thrill-seeker.

**********

She says her farewells to new friends. It is obvious that these people’s good opinions - Winthrop, Carol, Tulip, Quinn, and Barrows - matter greatly to her. Such an odd thing, for a smoothskin to care what a pack of ghouls think. Once they found that Charon was not going to be sent on a blood-soaked rampage, they do not seem too distressed over the un-lamentable murder behind the bar.

His Mistress is effusive and, if allowed the term,  _ handsy.  _ Not in a dirty way, but almost clinging and desperate. Charon thinks that, somewhere in her travels, his Mistress has found that life is short and a second farewell is never guaranteed. 

Her new friends embrace her like old ones, and Charon can only wonder at it. She has only been here two weeks, yet she seems to have inspired friendliness in everyone.

And the gifts. Carol hugs her tightly like a daughter when she receives a stack of jaunty red plates for her restaurant with hardly a scratch on them. Winthrop drops the sack of scrap metal, guffaws, and squeezes her fiercely. Barrows checks her pupils, tries to shake her hand after she gives him a jug of homemade disinfectant, and almost squeaks when she throws her arms around his neck. Tulip gets teary-eyed at her gift of a hug and a ragged-edged book. Quinn grins at the curious hat that seems to blend into the background, and picks her up, swinging her around like you might a child. His Mistress laughs like one, and Charon briefly wonders just exactly how old she is. 

Willow is another matter. His Mistress shakes her hand solemnly, thanking her for her help. And for once in her life, Willow has not one smart-ass thing to say. His Mistress presents her with a  _ carton _ of cigarettes and Willow’s eyes go wide. 

“Do you know how much these are worth, tourist?”

“Yeah, and if I had three more, I’d give you those too. I’ll be on the lookout, though.”

“You’re nuts,” Willow says slowly.

“Yep.”

They do not hug, but it seems right. Willow has never been the type, and Charon does not see that changing anytime soon.

“Keep her safe,” Willow tells him, more serious than he has ever seen her. “She's good people.”

Charon nods, but will reserve judgement on this new employer. The kind of people his contract tended to attract were usually the worst the Wasteland had to offer. And just because this one starts out as ‘good people’ does not mean she will stay that way. 

**********

They walk down the Mall, and it is quiet. He is not sure why she leaves in the evening. It is easily the most dangerous time to travel. But she seems comfortable in the twilight, braver and more confident under the cover of darkness. It settles on her like a mantle, and she seems to draw strength from it. This both confuses him, and makes him nervous. He usually says nothing, only speaking when spoken to, but she is either too stupid or naive to understand the danger. 

“Permission to speak, Mistress?”

“You just did,” she says with snark.

He says nothing because he does not find it funny.

She seems to realize her mistake. “Wow. Fuck-Face had you wound tighter than a Swiss watch, huh?”

There is also nothing to say to this truth.

“Hey. I’m sorry. You can say whatever you want. I mean, if you could try not to make me cry, that’d be great, but…”

“Night is a risky time to travel.”

She tilts her head further in his direction, her big eyes soaking up the new moonlight and reflecting it back at him. Something is wrong with those eyes for them to flash like some tiny nocturnal animal. 

"Nah, it’s fine. Sky's smaller at night," she says, as if that should explain everything.

**********

The tunnels are not too dangerous themselves; it is the connecting space above ground that holds death. Four or five ruined blocks between stations turns into ten and twenty after winding around dead end streets choked by the rubble of fallen buildings. And the denizens of downtown DC use it like lions use a watering hole or hunters the choke point of a canyon.

She does not seem to notice. 

“After this, I wonder if we should go home or head for the GNR station and find Three Dog.”

Charon simply grunts because he does not care.

She whistles tunelessly, jumping on top of piles of rubble and flapping her arms like a bird when she jumps off with much more energy than she needs to. 

“I’m supposed to be looking for someone, but I don't know if I want to find them.”

Again, Charon does not care. 

“It's my dad. We lived in the Vault, but he left. Then everyone tried to kill me, so I left too.”

He makes a non-committal ‘hmm’ sound, and hopes that she understands it means both nothing and that he really and truly does not care. 

“But if he left me there, I doubt he wants to see me much, right? And he lied to me, too. About  _ everything. _ My whole life. All a lie.”

Charon sighs as he does find a few little cares to drag out and look at. They are small and withered, and he is slightly surprised to find them at all.

“I mean, what's the point? It's not like he gives a shit about me. I could get myself killed wandering around looking for him.”

That is true enough. Downtown DC is no place for a creature so small. 

“What do you think I should do?”

Charon sighs irritably. “I follow you for good or for ill.”

She sighs a sigh to match his irritation and raise it.  “Oh my gosh, thank you. So helpful.”

He shrugs and keeps walking.

“Fine,” she says, resolutely plowing forward. “Megaton it is, then. I’m sick of running around getting my ass shot off, and goddamn it, I want a bath.”

He wonders just exactly what she is. A scavenger? Merc? Hapless wanderer?

So as they slink along the shadows of ruined buildings, he studies this new, strange person who now holds sway over his entire life. Laughably small, she would never be able to fight hand to hand, or even throw a meaningful punch, but she moves like quicksilver, navigating the piles of rubble with an animalistic grace he did not expect. 

She moves with such purpose, even though she has no idea where she is going. 

“Where the fuck are we? This is supposed to be the right street!” She shakes the arm that holds her portable computer with enough violence to make it rattle, pointing to a gigantic pile of toppled building that blocks her way.

While technically correct, this world is not built upon technicalities. Charon is a living map of the Wasteland. In his two centuries, he has been almost everywhere at least once. 

“Your map is not accurate here. To get to Our Lady Hope, we need to take the subway tunnel at Dupont Circle East.”

The grin she flashes him is so blinding he thinks he should shut his eyes against it or risk losing his newly acquired night vision. “Thanks! Too bad we weren't together when I first got to DC. Probably wouldn't have needed this plate in my head,” she says, smartly rapping her knuckles against her skull.

The way to the metro is quiet, but the dog bristles his ruff, silent, lip and nose wrinkling to flash white teeth. His Mistress stops dead, crouching and wary. A thin, shivering cry floats up above the rubble.

“Shit,” she says succinctly. “Wild dogs. Wolves, really. That's just the alpha.”

As if to prove her right, answering yips and howls bounce off the buildings all around them.

“Get ready. They'll rush us if they can.”

Charon checks his weapon, even though he knows it is primed for battle, just like himself. While it is just a pack of dogs, the endorphins start to flow, binding to receptors in a way that never fails to make him feel, for lack of a better word,  _ good. _ Not happy, exactly, but at least a little less miserable.

And what is happiness but the absence of misery?

Her whisper brings him back. “Do  _ NOT  _ shoot at anything attacking Dogmeat. If he needs help, he’ll tell you.”

Charon is surprised how many there are. He had expected two or three, but there are more than twice that. He calmly shoots four and finds the echoing report of his shotgun almost musical when paired with the sharp, staccato counterpoint of his Mistress’s assault rifle as she competently shoots three. The dog is locked in battle with the eighth, and the reason his Mistress had been explicit about not shooting near the dog is now painfully apparent.

The dog has put itself between his Mistress and its combatant, and it seems to be made of pure fury, sinking its fangs into the alpha mongrel with absolutely savage snarls. Charon feels a sort of kinship with the dog. He himself throws his own body into the fight with just as much single-minded determination.

The battle is pitched but even, and they are a tangle of straining limbs and flashing teeth. Blood is let from both animals, sparkling wine-red drops flung through the air to spatter in the dirt. While the mongrel has whipcord speed, the dog is heavy and wide, and most helpful of all, well-fed. The alpha snaps back viciously, but cannot seem to get a good hold on the dog's thickly furred ruff. With its lower center of gravity, the dog manages to knock the lighter alpha off its feet and pin it to the ground by the throat. They wrestle for a while, and Charon feels a pang of what might be sadness for the mongrel struggling in the dirt.

His Mistress seems resigned as well. Carefully creeping up and rocking back on her heels for momentum, she swings a heavy lead pipe into its skull.

“What a waste,” she says quietly as she looks over the carnage and flicks the blood and brain from the pipe. “I'd leave them alone if they'd just leave me alone.”

The dog does not seem to share her sentiment. It walks around the bodies on stiff legs, softly growling to itself, and Charon understands. The haze of the fight always clings, and it sometimes takes a while to clear. The endorphins cannot stop on a dime, after all.

He reloads, and expects to be commanded to butcher the carcasses for their meat, but she does not. Instead, she checks the dog over for wounds. Pulling out a stimpak, she doses the dog with murmured apologies about any stings, and Charon almost chokes at the extravagance.

She dons leather gloves and field-dresses all the mongrels except one with movements like a surgeon, quick and clean, only getting blood on her gloves and nowhere else. For some unaccountable reason, she seems to go out of her way to collect what little fat they contain.

Charon definitely does not want to ask.

“Hey, big guy? You hungry?”

At first, Charon is not sure if she is speaking to him or the dog, but she is looking at him expectantly. ‘Big guy’ is apparently his new designation. Charon is marginally offended at this new liberty she has taken, but then remembers his own unwanted title for her that she had patiently accepted. 

That, and he has been called much worse.

He simply nods yes, because he is in fact hungry, still puzzling about the dog fat, and also in shock that his Mistress would waste a stimpak on a mutt.

“Lemme wash my hands real quick,” she says, doing just that with a bottle of disinfectant, the same kind she had given Barrows, and Charon does not understand it. Why does she wash hands that were already covered by gloves?

She pulls out a bag of what appears to be cooked and dried mirelurk and a bottle of clean water, amicably splitting both with him. It is interesting how careful she is to give him a larger portion than her own. He wonders what she will feed the dog.

But as the dog rips into the still-warm guts of the dead alpha and gets blood up to its mismatched eyes, Charon is reminded once again that the Wasteland is a harsher mistress than his own could ever be.

**********

They stumble onto a freshly dead mutant, killed by an errant landmine, but not just any landmine. Some sort of explosive device with incredible power has blown off both an arm and a leg off the hulking beast.

She must see his mind working because she grins. “Bottlecap mine,” she says sagely as she delicately pulls a tinkered-with lunchbox out of her pack. “Moira makes them. Fucking glorious, huh? Poor bastard didn't stand a ch- OOOOO LOOK!”

His Mistress goes into fits of rapture over a Chinese assault rifle she finds next to the mutant, miraculously unharmed. She runs her hands all over it like a lover after a long absence, and the murmurs of tender endearments border on the obscene.

Charon puts another mental tally in the ‘bat-shit insane’ column.

Darting into a secluded alcove without so much as an ‘excuse me,’ she rips open her pack and yanks out five, Charon counts them,  _ five  _ assault rifles in various stages of disembowelment and tears them to even tinier pieces for the parts, actually squealing when she finds the bits she wants. She tinkers and toodles and finagles until she is thoroughly satisfied.

Her wandering eye alights on his shotgun and studies it with the air of a predator. She saunters up, attempting to tug it out of his hands, first gently, then more forcefully as he automatically resists. 

_ This is my rifle, there are many like it but this one is mine... _ ' his brain screams at him and his fists clamp down with an iron grip.

" Just...lemme...see it!" she grunts, setting back on her heels. While his mind may attempt to make war with the control chip lodged in the base of his brain, the victor of such a battle is always the same.

And besides, nothing he possesses is actually his.

His hands release, and she topples backwards, flat on her ass. She cradles the gun gently in her arms as if it is a precious thing and peers up at him, eyes searching his own opaque ones. "You think I'd keep it for myself?"

"All I possess-”

"I just wanted to fix it for you," she says with a sad smile. "The action isn't as smooth as it should be. I can hear it click when the rounds cycle."

Charon knows this. He hears it too, and it has irritated him for almost a year now, but Ahzrukhal was a cheap bastard, and Charon had not bothered to ask for parts. And there was always that niggling little thought that someday, if his gun misfires, someone or something would finally kill him.

His Mistress looks up at him, and holds out her hand expectantly. He takes her half gloved one and hauls her up out of the dirt. He is surprised when she hands him her own new rifle.

"Collateral," she explains. "So, you gonna let me fix it?"

"If that is what you wish."

She grins and sets to work, methodically interchanging parts with clever, little fingers while singing softly about houses on a hillside made of 'ticky-tacky' but they 'all look just the same,' and for a moment, she looks truly happy.

**********

They enter the subway tunnel and he grumbles at the paint-graffitied floors and profound smell of rot. 

"This place is not safe," he warns. He has checked his shotgun over, testing all of its various components, and he is satisfied that it will at least not explode in his face when he fires it.

"Don't worry," she says, grinning wide as if to put him at ease. Her teeth flash in the dark, and it has the opposite effect than what she probably intended. "I already took care of it." 

Charon finds he cannot quite believe her.

However, the ransacked containers, deftly sprung traps, and feral ghoul corpses tell him that someone has been here, and that whoever they were, they were not the type to simply lie down and die. 

“There was nothing I could do," she says as he looks down at a headless feral, wondering when he himself turned (and he surely would, eventually) if he would care, or even be aware enough to know when it happened. Her voice echoes in the large subway platform, but is somehow softer when tinged with regret, and the  _ guilt _ of it slices through his musing. 

"They were people once,” she says softly, sadly. "All I can do is try to put ‘em down easy. It's what I'd want, anyway."

Charon has never met anyone who feels regret when faced with a tunnel full of ferals. Terror and disgust, yes, but not sadness. It is something he cannot understand.

The raiders, however, do not warrant the same gentle respect. 

Looking around at the abandoned raider camp she has stopped in to cook the dog meat, Charon sees it was never abandoned at all. It simply holds what can be described as the remnants of  _ rage. _

Raiders, both men and women, have been exterminated. Their corpses had not been desecrated - that would just be cheap. No, this is the fallout from an anger so explosive it obliterates. One had been strangled from behind until their eyes bulged and their face turned a violent shade of purple. Another had their throat cut so brutally the head had almost been sawn off. A burly man had been shot but not killed, and the sliding trails of blood with tiny bootprints in their wake tells a story of revenge. For what or for who, Charon cannot tell. 

His Mistress savagely kicks at the beaten-in skull of one as she passes.

“Fucking  _ animals _ ,” she says, voice dripping with absolute disgust.

Charon tends to agree. There are many acceptable reasons for killing. Self-defense or defense of another. Revenge for a wrong. Charon even understands murder for money. At least these have goals and rules and purpose. But killing just because you like the feeling? Not even animals do that.

Charon wonders what sort of animal he might be, then.

**********

To his disappointment, Charon never even gets to try out the newly repaired shotgun his Mistress had insisted on tinkering with.

The raiders and the carnage of their deaths have put him on edge. He dashes off to clear a path for her, and is shocked when she yells at him.

“You trying to get killed?! I know this maybe wasn’t your first career choice...”

He growls with irritation. She seems to think him useless. “My previous employers would have me make the way safe for them.”

“I am  _ not _ one of your previous employers,” she says as she draws herself up to her full, insignificant height, like some tiny, angry queen. 

Yes. This is what he has been waiting for. Demands, orders, commands, the assertion of power and position - these are all things he could understand, and he is immediately more at ease.  

And then she shatters what little peace he has found.

“Your  _ previous _ employers were a bunch of shitscrams who used you as a meat shield." She does not poke a finger in his chest, but looks like she wants to. "We work as a team, because we are a team. Besides, Dogmeat said he's bored.”

A soft ‘ _ shh _ ’ sound and a twirl of her wrist with the first two fingers stuck out sends the mutt into kill mode, silently ripping apart the few mole rats and radroaches that had dared to re-enter the tunnels.

The dog comes back with a radroach in its mouth, tail high and wagging furiously. 

“For me?!” she says, hand over her heart and eyes open wide in feigned surprise. “You shouldn’t have!”

The dog drops the radroach at her feet as if it is a priceless gift.

“Who’s mama’s good boy?!” she says, jumping from one foot to the other.

The dog barks and frisks around her, turning quick circles and doing impressively acrobatic half-backflips.

“That’s right! Baby-dog is mama’s good boy! But shh, it's a secret!” His Mistress says in a whisper, finger held up to her lips. The dog drops to its belly and makes a snapping, soundless bark.

“Good boy!”

Charon, never much of a talker to begin with, is at a loss for words.

“He loves to bring me things. He thinks I don't eat enough,” she says to Charon behind her hand, as if afraid to offend the dog for its terrible gift-giving skills. “He used to bring me dead body parts. Human ones. That was icky.”

She harvests the radroach meat, but whether she is actually going to eat it or does it simply to humor the dog, Charon cannot tell.

As they walk through the tunnels, she talks to the dog as if it is a person. Charon is not sure if she truly thinks it answers her, but she carries on conversations so one sided she might as well be speaking to a wall. Charon belatedly realizes that he himself speaks just about as much as the dog, so it is not surprising she chatters at them both as if they might start to talk back. His Mistress seems to have infinite patience in that regard. The dog cocks its head and listens gravely as she waxes philosophical on subjects that are far out of his depth - like the virtues of Frost's lyricism compared to Poe's beautiful morbidity, how Neruda was a bad, bad man, and her firm belief that while Cummings was a pretentious prick with his lowercase letters and stupid parentheses, he sometimes said very pretty things.

However, Charon could see how both he and the mutt might be perfect conversationalists. 

At least neither would interrupt.

**********

This hospital she has broken into, Our Lady Hope, is a mistake. It appears to be abandoned, but it is not empty at all.

She winds her way around the hallways that are barely wide enough to admit two, and he fervently wills her to stop, turn around and leave. 

A muffled, but heavy footstep sounds through a wall.  

Charon grabs her by the utility belt and hauls her back to him. “I do not like the look of this place,” he growls softly into her ear.

The dog seems to feel the same, hackles raised but silent as a ghost.

She tugs forward but he holds on. Turning around to hiss at him, she stiffens as a heavy exhaled breath sounds from around the corner. A low human cry follows it, the kind a person makes when they have given up on life, but their mouth stubbornly keeps making noises. As one, they ready their already raised weapons and go still as statues. The mutant that belongs to the snuffling and heavy breathing turns the corner and many things happen at once.

A human - beaten so badly, Charon can only guess at its gender - stumbles forward into view as the mutant pushes them from behind. The captive turns their head and the blooming light of hope in their eyes is terrible. Hands outstretched, the human veers towards her and as the mutant blows their head off, his Mistress is enveloped in a mist of pink brain matter and red arterial spray.

The mutant roars as three quick rounds snap into its chest, but the sound is cut off as Charon calmly sends a shotgun slug into its brain and his Mistress is covered in a second layer of gore.

His Mistress stands transfixed, but slowly turns to face him.

“WHAT THE FUCK, MAN?!”

She is either very angry, or made deaf from the shotgun blast next to her ear. He stares back at her, and wonders if she caught part of the blast herself. The whites of her wide eyes are stark against a face painted with red.

Rough voices call out from all around them.

_ WHAT WAS THAT? _

_ A NOISE! _

_ I SMELL HUMAN! _

_I SMELL GHOUL!_

_ FIND IT! EAT IT! _

_ THE GHOUL?! _

_ NO! YUCK! THE HUMAN! _

It is now critical that they get out of this place immediately. If she had been an experienced mercenary or soldier, they may have been able to clear the building, but as they are now, the very idea that they could survive is ridiculous.

Charon understands the value of a hasty retreat.

The moment crystallizes and he knows if he leaves her even one opportunity to give him a tactical command, all will be lost. Clamping a hand over her mouth, he grabs her under his arm like a cord of wood and sprints out of the building. She weighs about as much as a pile of wet paper, but fights like the very devil. She kicks and wriggles and tries to get her jaws open wide enough to bite him, but he ignores her until they are out of the building and two blocks away. Dumping her unceremoniously on her ass behind the counter of an empty diner, he crouches next to her, still not daring to take his hand from her mouth.

If looks could kill, her baleful eyes would have struck him dead. 

Charon puts a finger to his lips in a silent request for more silence. It is the same sign she gives the dog, so he thinks she will understand. The dog makes that odd, soundless bark, lolling out its tongue and looking immensely pleased with itself. 

She nods her assent, and his palm comes away from her mouth both sticky with blood and hot with the heat of her lips.

The mutants’ voices say they are searching for them, but after a tense few minutes, they wander away, becoming muffled and finally disappearing. Breathing easier now, he takes time to check his his weapon. She is still sitting there, staring at him.

“Did you have to shoot right in my ear?” she complains, shaking her head and working her jaw to clear the buzz from her ears.

He will not dignify that with a response and simply crosses his arms and stares at a point above her head.

“There could be more people in there,” she says reproachfully, as if this whole ridiculous scene is his fault. Adrenaline is coursing through his veins like a drug and the words come out before he can stop them. 

“And if you go back in, we will all be killed.”

As much as he likes to think he is no one’s errand boy, Charon is a slave in everything but name, and he knows it. His employers can command him to speak or be silent, to fight to the death or simply carry all the useless shit they collect. It is an odd set of ligatures binding his free will. But with each employer comes a clean slate, and as the years pass, he feels the assertion of his own will surfacing. He still cannot disobey a viable order, but the feeling that with enough effort he someday could, grows stronger. 

“Yeah,” she says with a sigh, “I guess.” She gets to her feet and disconcertingly, checks him over for wounds, frowning at the blood on his palm.

“Not mine,” he answers to her unspoken question. “Your face.”

She swipes her fingertips along her jaw and they come back covered in clotted blood. It is then he discovers she cannot stand to be dirty, because for a moment, she goes positively mad.  

“Oh fuck this place _SO_ hard!” she moans, as pitiful as if she really had been shot.

She whips out her knife, cuts the cloth from a diner stool, stumbles to the kitchen sink, douses it in a glugging stream of dirty water that is sure to be buzzing with radiation, and attacks her own face with it. Her eyes have gone glassy, and he is positive that she has forgotten he is even there. Wriggling out of the top of her jumpsuit, she scrubs viciously at her dark freckled skin until Charon wonders if she is having a mental breakdown.

Running a hand through her mop of hair, her fingers get stuck in the clotting gore, and she lets out a strangled and wordless wail, breathing fast enough to hyperventilate.

His Mistress is a wreck, streaked with blood and raw patches of skin, curly hair hanging in sticky knots, and as Charon belatedly notices, almost naked from the waist up. Her collarbones swoop down and then up like bird wings and the smooth plain of her stomach ripples as she frantically scrubs at herself with the same mindless panic a wild animal uses to chew its own leg off to be free of a trap. 

Charon practically sprints out to scout the perimeter, anything to be away from the feral creature behind the counter.

**********

A half hour later, she emerges, skin scrubbed raw but clean. Her eyes are rimmed red and she gives him a wan smile.

But it is the hair that has him frozen in place. 

She has cut it all off to the scalp, except a wide strip down the middle that she has braided - a haircut fit for a raider. The knicks and scrapes on the skin say she has tried to shave it as close as possible, likely with the fine blade of her knife. The wickedly curving scar of Barrows’ surgical prowess gleams white on the freshly shorn skull. She looks slightly unhinged, but speaks calmly and rationally - with exquisite enunciation - and her voice has a core of steel that is undeniable.

“Thank you for keeping me safe, Charon. I appreciate it very much. But I am going back in there.”

He opens his mouth to argue - she has not given him an explicit command yet - but she slices a hand through the air and his argument.

“I made a promise. I'm going. If you want to stay here, it’s okay.”

“I follow you for good or for ill,” he hears himself growl.

Charon notices that the ‘bat-shit insane’ column is getting very full indeed.

**********

As they settle into a battle rhythm that is surprisingly fluid, Charon discovers that his Mistress is not defenseless.

At all.

She may be small and leanly muscled, but she sneaks with all the grace and silence of a cat, and Charon knows he has misjudged her.

He can use stealth well himself, and at her clear hand signals, they separate and silently attack enemies at their flanks, using pincer tactics and all three of their little army to overwhelm and destroy. The dog's teeth are sharp, and she handles her rifle with a cool detachment only broken by a manic grin as she fires. His own shotgun, one that has been with him for decades, is operating more smoothly than he can remember.

They climb a few flights of stairs and look through glass windows into a gallery that was once an atrium or waiting room for patients.

“Perfect,” she breathes, ghosting away. He tries to follow, but she throws up a fist - an emphatic command to hold - and both he and the dog go still.

“Can you watch my back from up here?” she whispers.

“Yes.”

“Good. Stay here, but you might want to plug your ears.”

What she can mean, he cannot fathom, but then she is gone, and not even his own sharp ears can track her progress. ‘Stay’ is such a  _ dangerous _ command. He will be forced to stay exactly where he is until she either calls for him or dies. 

He sees her after a few tense moments, setting traps and mines like planting a garden. Disappearing into a hallway, she lets loose a scream, terror scaling the pitch into something that sends a shiver down his spine and he feels himself strain against the chip’s iron hold to go find her. Roars of rage follow her shrieks and then she bursts through a door and down a flight of stairs, a horde of mutants hot on her heels. She looks up at Charon but there is no fear on her face.

She  _ winks _ .

Leaping over each mine with a hurdler’s stride, she is across the gallery and through the other side in moments.

The explosions directly behind her are deafening, and Charon shields his eyes as some of the plate glass shatters. 

She scrambles up the stairs and an injured mutant barrels down on her, intent on pulling her apart. Charon snarls and puts a slug neatly in the side of its head, but the mutant’s momentum while alive sends both her and the stone dead corpse crashing through the glass window. She screams his name as she falls, and it combined with a true note of fear is enough to obliterate her last command to stay.

The mutt barks frantically and Charon has to grab it firmly by the ruff to keep it from jumping through the window after her. Yelping dog in one hand and shotgun in the other, he sprints down the stairs.

He sets the dog down and it whines and paces, snuffling at the weakly scrabbling hand that peeks out from under the green bulk. Rolling the corpse off of her, she is frighteningly still; her only movement to blink.

“Ow,” she whispers plaintively to the ceiling. 

“Are you injured?”

She gives him a scathing look that says, ‘Ya think?’. “Glass. In my back.”

And she is right. Something has pierced through her abdomen, the glint of what could be confused for a the point of a knife poking out right under her last set of ribs. Blood is blossoming around the wound, turning the blue of her suit a wet purple.

“Can you pull it out?” Her voice is nothing but a wheeze, and he wonders what important things the glass has torn apart. 

“I will try.”

“Thanks. Stimpaks. Right pocket.”

He finds the stimpaks and pulls out four, not sure if he may need more. Better to have too many than too few, Charon supposes. Pulling out the shard of glass from the front seems like a terrible idea, but he almost does not want to touch her. But she had asked for his help so he tries to gently roll her to her side to get to her back.

She screams.

Loud and in a pitch so high it could call dogs from all across the Capital Wasteland, she shrieks right in his ear. “Jesus fuck, pull it out quick!”

So startled, he clamps it between his fingers and yanks. If Charon were a softer creature, he would have gagged at the size of the triangle of glass he had pulled out, almost as wide as his hand and half the length of his forearm. She only drags in a rattling breath, and remembering the stimpaks, he doses the gaping hole in her back twice.

She tenses and sighs, and as he rolls her to her back, her breaths even out. 

Are you well?” he asks.

“Fuck no. Leg’s broke. See?”

The leg itself looks fine, but the toe of her boot is pointing in a contrary direction and it appears to be several inches shorter than the other. Charon grabs another stimpak in his fist to dose her hip but she almost screams at him to stop. 

“You can't. Got to set the leg first or it’ll heal all fucked up.”

Two stories is not too far to fall, but being crushed by a super mutant must at least double the impact. Her skin is ashen and clammy, and she shivers uncontrollably. Charon is sure there must be internal damage or shock or some equally fatal medical problem he does not understand going on besides a broken leg and a glass knife through her stomach.

“Med-X would take some of the pain,” he says, because he does know at least that much.

“I’m shaking too bad to catch a vein, but you can try if you want. Same pocket.”

He pulls out the syringe and inspects it. It has a cap, a beveled needle, and on the side of the slim syringe are tic marks with numbers that, while he can read, hold no meaning for him.

“I have no practice with this,” he admits.

“S’okay,” she says, eyes blinking quickly, and he can tell she is trying to keep unconsciousness at bay. “I’ll walk you through it. Need a leather belt. Pull it tight on the upper arm.”

Her teeth chatter, but her voice is calm. Not daring to move her hips to unfasten her own, he uses one of the many belts that fasten his armor. Ratcheting it down tight, he puts the end under his knee to keep slack out of it, and the veins in her arm pop out as she closes her hand into a fist.

“Needle goes in the vein at the elbow. If you can’t see it, feel it with your fingers. Needle goes in, bevel side up, at a 10 degree angle. Pull back on the plunger. When you see blood, you're in.”

He does as instructed, and her skin is exactly as soft as it looks under his searching fingers. But he finds the vein, and is surprised when he gets it on the first try.

“Nice. Belt comes off. Now this is important. I only need half the syringe. Any more will be bad.”

“Bad?” he asks.

“Overdose.”

He almost drops the syringe when she tells him he literally has her life in his hand. One slip of his thumb and he could end her. And the way she has stupidly phrased her command into something that is not a command at all - no imperatives, no absolutes - just slippery information that allows him far too much autonomy. She has failed to tell him specifically to do or  _ not  _ to do a thing, so the loophole remains open. Charon is a master of loopholes, and this one is still large enough to end her with. He has ended others with ones much smaller.

_ I protect your life with my life. _

Surely that only pertains to combat. He flexes the muscles of his hand, and feels that if he wanted, they may not stop him from shooting her up with the full syringe.The knowledge makes him slightly dizzy, and he does not know if it is the heady feeling of power over one who controls him, or fear of that power.

With exquisite care, he pushes the plunger down halfway and quickly pulls the needle out of her arm before he has a chance to think about it.

She sighs, and the sound is almost sinful with relief. “Thank you,” she says softly. Her voice is stronger now, less reedy, and she seems to gather herself.

“Now you've got to set it. Roll it to the right and pull down at the same time.  _ Hard.  _ Don't be a pussy about it, no matter how much I scream. Just make them match and that will be good enough.”

Charon has never set anyone's leg before. Not one of his employers had ever asked him for help in that regard. Perhaps it was because most became so fearful of his savagery by the end. But he also does not like the way this new employer trusts him so blindly, as if she does not understand that he is death made flesh. But he doggedly prepares to follow her instruction to make both legs match. 

“Wait!” she squeaks, breath labored again, but now from both pain and fear. The Med-X may have taken the edge off, but she is still in immense pain. Closing her eyes, she makes an odd, quick rhythm of breaths, followed by one long, smooth exhale. She nods her head sharply, and Charon decides that waiting will only make it worse. 

He wrenches her leg down and clockwise in one smooth, brutal motion, and what is left of his skin crawls as he feels the crunch of broken bone grind under his hands.

She does not scream, not like he would have imagined. Instead she lets loose a string of whispered curses, and while the words are foul enough to peel paint, they run together in an almost religious-sounding chant.

“Rot-snatched-fuck-trumpet-shitfucked-fucker.”

He quickly doses her hip and she loses consciousness for a few brief moments. She lays there, panting softly as her body knits slowly - and painfully - back together. Charon wonders if she will sleep another day like she had in Underworld.

But even as the rise and fall of her chest evens and the color returns to her face, she groans softly and her eyes flutter open.

“Am I dead?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Huh. Could’ve fooled me.”

Very carefully sitting up, she laughs weakly as the dog stuffs its nose in her face.

“I'm alright, Baby-dog,” she says, rubbing her knuckles between its eyes, and Charon feels the tightness in his chest that he had not noticed release.

“Thanks, big guy,” she says, serious little face tipped up to look into his. “You just saved me from being the first person to be killed by a dead body.”

**********

They have rescued the people on the roof, saw them home safely, and his Mistress has become an honorary member of their little clan.

Of course, in addition to patching everyone up and fixing any inconsequential personnel problems they have, she promises to map the Wasteland for them.

But now they are traveling, and Charon finds he does not mind breathing fresher air, and the moldiness of Underworld is slowly fading from his lungs. His Mistress plies him with food and water, trying to get him to eat almost constantly, and he does not know if she stops so often for snacks for him or for herself.

“So,” she says after swallowing a mouthful of potato crisps, “I have something called  _ hy-po-gly-ce-mi-a.”  _ The word from the foreign language she speaks rolls off her tongue, each syllable its own drop of water. “I mean, that's not the only thing I got goin’ on, but it's what really kicks my ass. I used to take medication for it, but _ … _ ” She shrugs her shoulders in a motion that says ‘what can you do?’. “Anyway, it means I've got to eat a lot. Otherwise I get headaches, get really cranky.”

This new information, while interesting, does not explain why she makes him eat as well. He tries to give her back the package of Fancy Lad snack cakes, for her  _ hy-po-gly-ce-mi-a _ , but she pushes it back to him. 

“Nah. You need to eat too. You don't weigh enough.”

As if he needs to be any bigger. Charon already takes up far more than his fair share of space.

She catches his look and snorts. “I’m what passes for a doctor around here, and I say you're too skinny.”

‘Skinny’ is not how Charon or any normal person would describe himself, but his Mistress is certainly not normal. 

She sighs. “Just try and eat a little more, okay?”

He humors her, for now. But when she turns her back, he tries to slip the bottle of water back into her pack.

“And drink your water,” she says without even turning around.

It is said that mothers have eyes in the back of their heads, but perhaps it is true of all females.

**********

His Mistress stops so suddenly in the road, he almost plows into her from behind. 

She sweeps her arm wide in a grandiose gesture as if to say, ‘behold!’

Looming large in the twilight, there is a white stone building, remarkably untouched by the Great War and its bombs. His Mistress skips happily up to the steps, the dog frolicking around her. Tracing light fingertips around a patch of whiter, less weathered stone, she sighs with contentment. 

“Don't you realize what this is?”

A death trap. That is what this place is. Likely filled with hordes of mutants exactly like the one she had almost been crushed to death under. And Charon gets the nasty feeling that she wants to go inside.

“It’s the Carnegie!”

He simply stares at her in stony silence because that means nothing to him. 

“The first library in DC!”

Still nothing, and Charon thinks this may become a familiar theme. 

She growls an offended  _ ‘heathen’ _ at him under her breath, and sets to work picking the lock. Her delicate fingers are rock-steady as she teases the lock open, but the doors still refuse to budge. Not one to be dissuaded by simple security, she finds another way.

“Gimme a boost.”

“A what?”

“A  _ boost _ !” his Mistress says, waving a screwdriver at the barred window above her head with no small amount of exasperation.

This is ridiculous. Beyond ridiculous. Charon is a killing machine, a harbinger of death, a monster whose express purpose on the face of this earth is to spatter enough blood and gore until he can wade knee-deep in it.

He sighs a sigh that says his soul might be trying to leave his body and makes a cup of his two big hands. She smiles and puts one tiny, dusty boot in them. He lifts her easily with her wet paper weight, and she squeaks and laughs.

“Holy shit, I'm tall!”

Wriggling and writhing, she scrambles up and puts one foot on each of his shoulders. He grabs her ankles to steady her when she almost topples backwards, and marvels at how his hand almost encloses it completely.

A few quiet curses and she has the steel grate loose and tossed a few yards behind them. She shimmies up, perched on the wide stone window ledge with a bright grin. 

“Thanks,” she whispers. “I’ll be right down.”

Charon wants to ask her what she will do if she cannot get the door open, and gets trapped inside because she is too short to climb back out the window, but figures if she got herself into this mess, she should probably be able to get herself out again. 

She is either very smart or very lucky, because after some muffled grunts and curses, the huge doors screech open as if they had to shake off two centuries of rust. The dusty face that peeks out is lit up from inside like a small star and she is practically  _ vibrating _ with excitement.

“Charon, oh my god, you won't believe it,” she says. “They barricaded themselves in when the bombs fell! I mean, it's super sad and stuff, but look! It's so  _ beautiful!” _

And as Charon closes the door behind him and turns, he somewhat understands his Mistress’s awe. He stares up and up, and it is true. While the ceiling plaster is coming down in sheets and the wallpaper is curling, a gigantic staircase flanked with untouched frescoes, gilt handrails, and perfect stonework stuns him into stillness.

She skips up the steps, twirling and pirouetting, and disappears among the bookshelves. The dog sniffs and pricks up its ears, but must decide that the coast is clear, because he gambols behind her and Charon has no choice but to follow.

He finds his Mistress sitting on a throne of books like a queen holding court among silent subjects. As she lays back on her dais made of pages and thumbs through book after book, a memory hits him like a freight train.

_ “Shh,” she whispers teasingly, slender finger pressed against rose-petal lips. “Libraries are for quiet.” But as he backs her up into a shelf in the history section and lightly bites her fingertip and kisses those perfect lips, the sweetly surprised ‘oh’ says she can’t seem to take her own advice. _

“Look!” his Mistress says excitedly, dragging him back down to earth. “The classics section! Les Miserables...Three Musketeers...Don Quixote...holy shit! The Collected Works of Robert Frost!”

Charon could care less about the goddamn books. That memory had been an absolute mind fucker. His body is reacting to the taste of a kiss so vivid, he is almost sure it had to be real. He stalks around the large room to calm himself. Pacing and prowling, he shakes his head to get both the memory and his Mistress’s yammering out of his brain, but the electric tingle of memories refuses to be ignored.

“Pride and Prejudice...The Call of the Wild…White Fang, too?! I'm totally coming back here,” she says, but it is the sharp intake of breath she makes that has Charon’s head up and scanning for enemies.

“The Odyssey,” she whispers in hushed and reverent tones as she turns a tattered leather book delicately over in her hands, running a feather-light fingertip down its spine. Charon feels a shiver run down his spine when he thinks of the fingertip in his memory and how it had felt between his teeth. 

In the here and now, her eyes shift all over the room, bristling as if someone might try to take it from her. 

“I mean, it's a Chapman, not a Pope or anything, but still…”

While Charon knows how to read, he has not had much opportunity and does not experience the same pull to dusty pages as his Mistress does. However, he understands that books can hold all sorts of information useful for survival. Perhaps this 'Odyssey' book is about how to travel more safely.

She carefully flips to a particular page, and when she reads out loud, her voice changes into something metered and smooth, and Charon discovers it is not a guidebook in the way he had thought.

_ “And if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep, even so, I shall endure. _

_ For already I have suffered full much, and much have I toiled in perils of waves and war, _

_ Let this be added to the tale of those.” _

It must be important if she throws out everything not essential for survival and some things that are, simply to make room for more books.

A pile of Talon Company armor (‘I’ll just get more later,’ she says, and Charon does not want to know what she means by that.)

A set of what appears to be power armor, but in a material and configuration that is decidedly not Brotherhood issue (‘Still dunno who the fuck that guy was,’ she gripes, but Charon would very much like to know ‘who the fuck that guy was’ and how she had stolen his armor.)

A shiny missile launcher that she looks absolutely  _ crushed _ to leave behind (‘Do you know how long I worked on that thing?!’ and Charon wonders where she found more than one to take parts from.) 

But there are also things that Charon can see no use for - mostly boxes of Abraxo (‘No laundry day this week,’ she says with a shrug as she throws them over her shoulder and the only thing Charon can wonder is why she had picked them up in the first place.)

She squirrels away as many books as she can, sending heartbroken glances and tragic sighs fit for forlorn lovers at the missile launcher, and Charon finally takes pity on her. Or maybe he decides it would be prudent to be better armed in case of a deathclaw-level emergency.

Yes. It is definitely the last reason.

Ignoring the pile of junk, he carefully arranges the armor and the missile launcher in his own, thus far unused pack. He honestly wonders why she had not commanded him to be her personal pack mule already.

“You don't have to carry that!” she says, and she sounds almost scandalized.

“Do you wish to leave it here?”

“Well, I mean,  _ no _ , but-”

“Then I will carry it. We will move faster that way.”

His Mistress looks at him, searching for what, he cannot tell. She finally grins and launches herself at him.

Charon tries to backpedal but his escape is thwarted by the library shelf that he smacks the back of his head into, and she has already plowed into him, arms around his waist and the side of her face pressed into his chest in what must pass for a hug.

“Thanks, big guy!” she chirps up at him, and Charon thanks every god he can think of when she finally lets him go with one last squeeze and goes bouncing down the stairs and out the door, dog trotting along behind.

All he can do is shake his head in consternation and follow her.

Charon was right.

This new employer truly is bat-shit insane.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I also like to read. A lot. So to give credit where credit is due...
> 
> Literary works quoted:
> 
> The Oddessey - Homer


	10. God Is Dead

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration provided by:
> 
> Ambre - Nils Frahm  
> Pain Has A Memory - Rhiannon Bannerberg  
> Away - Tonie Green  
> Time Has Changed - Federico Albanese  
> An Island - Dirk Maassen  
> Bless Those Tired Eyes - Clem Leek

Charon finally solves the mystery of her obsession with animal fat.

The place they stop is non-descript - just a collection of picnic tables on a bit of bluff. A fire pit topped with a large cooking pot is in the middle, and she smiles fondly at it.

“Thank goodness. I was running low!” she says, starting a fire. She has steady hands and sure movements, but Charon can see it is something she has taught herself. The flame is too high, too visible from far off, and is the type that will attract attention, especially in the dark. She must see him watching because she stops, and he is surprised when she does not yell at him to mind his own business.

She heaves a defeated sigh instead. “I’m doing this wrong, aren’t I.”

“Yes.”

“You probably know lots of stuff I don't. If I'm doing something wrong, you'd tell me, right?”

“If you are sure that is what you wish. My previous employers did not care for my advice.”

“Probably why they're all dead, huh.”

She is not completely wrong.

“Not all, but many.”

“Well, let's not add me to that list, okay? I can’t promise to follow all your advice, but I’d always like to hear what you have to say.”

“As you wish.” Many employers have said such things, but none had truly meant it. Charon had found most could not stand to be corrected, and fewer still would even ask him in the first place.

So Charon fixes her fire in Wasteland fashion - short and wide, ringed tall with rocks to cover the glare that would bring nocturnal hunters from all around. She watches closely, seeming to commit each of his movements to memory. His work done, Charon stands there, not completely sure what to do with himself, but the dog seems at ease, flopping down on its belly and sticking its hind legs out behind it.

“Take a load off, big guy,” she says, putting a bottle of water and another bag of mirelurk jerky in his hands. “It takes a while to make soap.”

“Soap?” he asks stupidly.

“Mmhmm. Reeks, but it's worth it.”

In the middle of a world comprised solely of filth, blood, and desperation, his Mistress is going to attempt to make soap.

But Charon sees she is not merely attempting, she is _doing_ , and with the surety that comes with practice and experience. So he sits at a picnic table with his legs stretched out like the dog’s (as he had been instructed to ‘take a load off’), snacking on mirelurk and drinking water (both because he is ‘too skinny’ and thinks the eyes in the back of her head may have something to say about it if he attempts any subterfuge). It is a mystery why she does what she does - heating the hunks of fat in the pot, sprinkling in plant leaves that he had always considered weeds, scraping unwanted bits from the top and tossing them to the dog who lazily snaps them up.

“Fat makes his coat shiny,” she says, and perhaps it is true, because the dog does look in better shape than any other Wasteland creature Charon has ever seen.

She chitters to herself and to anyone or thing that may want to listen - about how when the charcoal in a second pot is mixed with the dirty water she has hauled from a puddle, it will become a caustic lye, how the melted animal fats combine with the lye in a process called _saponification_ , how sad she is that the wood-ash slurry is not capable of making ‘pretty’ soap, lamenting the lack of ‘table’ salt in the world (which would somehow also make it pretty), but how pleased she is that at least the tiny white flowers and silvery leaves (‘yarrow’, she calls them) will make it smell better than it looks.

And she is right on a few accounts. The making of soap takes hours. Also, the rendering fat does reek to high heaven. His Mistress does not seem to mind - her eyes magnified like an insect’s by a pair of chemist’s goggles, hands in her leather gloves, the lower part of her face covered by a water-soaked bandana - she happily stirs and sings offkey songs about ‘soap, soap, glorious soap, soap for you and soap for me, soap for all humanity’.

Charon sits and does a fantastic amount of nothing. It makes him twitch at first, this stillness, and he really just wants to prowl in the dark, but he finally settles and lets her chittering wash over him.

The result of her efforts is something he has never seen before - a sort of disgusting, brown jelly-ish substance that looks like it came from the guts of a bloatfly. But it does not smell bad, more like nothing than anything else, perhaps a bit spicy, like the silvery, furry leaves she had added. But it is apparently up to her standards, because she carefully globs it in a few empty bottles and admires them a moment before stuffing them in her pack.

“Ready for bed? It’s getting light out.”

Charon does not bother to tell her that should mean she should be waking and not sleeping.

“I will keep watch.”

She crosses her arms. “Dogmeat and I always split it. He likes to take the last one. Dunno why. Maybe cause it's the ‘dog’s watch’.”

Charon cannot tell if she is joking, and he does not particularly trust her with a watch of any kind, especially the more taxing of the two. The ‘dog’s watch’ is always when trouble starts, and he supposes it is no different in the daylight, if not worse.

“I rested at Carol’s,” he counters.

His Mistress looks at him but simply shrugs her shoulders. “Mule of a man, aren’t ya? Well,” she says, “I’m not your mom. Just don’t blame me when you fall on your face because you were stubborn.”

She stays up for a few hours, petting the dog while it sleeps with its head in her lap, giggling when it snorts and twitches its paws as it dreams.

“Have you ever seen anything so fucking _cute_?!” she whispers.

‘Cute’ is not in Charon’s vocabulary, and he gives her a look that says so.

“Fun-hater,” she accuses, but any further insult is interrupted by an enormous yawn.

“You should sleep, Mistress.”

“I will. Dogmeat and me, we got an agreement. I pet his head, and he's my pillow. Works good. You should try it. Then we could split it in thirds.”

Charon does not want to pet anyone’s head or be anyone’s pillow, and there is certainly no way he will sleep with only a dog between him and an assassin’s knife across his throat.

A few hours more, and an alarm chimes softly from her computer. The dog wakes and lazily stretches everything from snout to tail. His Mistress starts her evening (afternoon?) ritual - brushing her teeth and combing her fingers through her mohawked hair - and Charon wonders where she is planning to sleep.

He shortly gets his answer, and it is definitely unexpected.

His Mistress crawls under a picnic table and fussily lays down a small rectangle of fabric that must pass for a blanket. Tying on a red bandana like a blindfold, she tosses him a ‘goodnight’ paired with another enormous yawn that scales up into a yip at the end, and curled up with her head pillowed on the dog, quickly drops off to sleep.

Charon is again at a loss for words. His Mistress abandons bags of caps and wastes stimpaks on dogs, is spoiled enough to require soap and clean fingernails, yet is perfectly happy bedding down in the dirt like a wild animal.

The dog appears to think all this commonplace, because it lays with its chin on its paws, alert ears constantly swiveling and nose twitching as it seines the air for scents. The air of the day is heavy, bringing a humidity paired with a sharpness that Charon associates with storms. One is coming, but whether it will drop any precipitation or pass by overhead, he cannot tell. The dog’s nose shivers, its ears pricking up and forward. A low growl rumbles in its chest, no less menacing for its quietness.

His Mistress does not notice and keeps sleeping as if the world could not possibly be rotten to its core.

Charon is already up, shotgun out and scanning for enemies, but either the dog is slowly going rabid, or it can sense enemies yards further than Charon could ever hope to. While he thinks he can trust the dog’s nose, he does not trust it to take care of whatever is lurking, so he tells it to stay, making a fist like his Mistress does.

Surprisingly, it seems to understand.

Charon scouts the perimeter and finds nothing. Just when he decides the dog is going mad, he sees it.

A band of three humanoids move in loose formation below the bluff. They move as if they are drunk or ill, and either way, it puts him on edge. Raiders, he thinks, but he is too far away to be truly certain. Going back to his Mistress may not be advisable, as he may draw them to her, and since she stupidly refuses to give him orders, Charon is at a loss of how to proceed, so he makes a tactical decision that has worked well in the past.

A pre-emptive strike.

He approaches silently from behind, and so rotted from the inside-out with Jet and Med-X, they are in no shape to defend themselves properly. One gibbers nonsense to themselves about bats, while the other two cling to each other in an attempt not to fall down. All three stink like a slow and lingering death, the kind that even animals do not like to be near.

And people say ghouls are disgusting.

Charon destroys them with his knife, and easily. The two throats so close together are slit and the third throws itself at Charon like a feral, all wild eyes and snapping teeth, and actually gets a bite in on his forearm. That one is satisfactorily eviscerated out of sheer spite.

It is almost anticlimactic.

“Whatcha doin’, big guy?”

Charon thinks he should get some kind of award for not stabbing her by accident, because his knife is still in his fist and only her name for him keeps her from being skewered. He takes two deep breaths, both to calm the shaking of his hands and to formulate words.

“Removing any threats to your person.”

Her eyes are wide, staring at the newly puddled raider at his feet. “And didn’t you _just_.”

“Is there a problem with my methods, Mistress?”

“They’re very, um, _thorough_. Is that...a _spleen_? That's totally a spleen.”

“He was an enemy.” His Mistress needs to grow thicker skin if a pile of guts bothers her.

“Was. Lots and lots of ‘was’. So. Much. ‘Was’. You know, I've told people I would gut them like a fish, but I never actually _did_ it.”

She still stares at the pile like it might hold the answers to life. Either that, or she is still trying to discern if it really is a spleen. A lightbulb pops on and Charon realizes it may be shock.

“Mistress, are you...well?”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah. Totally fine. Super. Definitely not freaking out. Not at all. Um, did you know he’s kinda still alive? Just a little? I mean, I don’t want to tell you how to do your job or anything...”

That fact had escaped him, actually. The raider is alive, but not conscious. They are making little twitching motions, but they have stopped breathing.

He breaks their neck with a stomp of his boot.

“Better?”

“Mmm. Much. He was judging me.” Her eyes are still wide, and Charon has no idea what is going on in her head. Her reactions are certainly not normal. She blinks rapidly and gives her head a few little shakes, like when you clear water out of your ears after a swim.

Why didn’t you wake me up?” she asks, and she seems to have shaken out whatever little madness had taken up residence in her brain.

“You needed rest.”

“Maybe, but I _didn’t_ need the scout that tried to slit my throat in my sleep.” She seems less in shock and more angry now, which Charon counts as an improvement.

“Scout?” He immediately checks her over for wounds, but she appears unharmed. However, just because there is no blood does not mean she is uninjured.

“He’s dead and I’m not, if that's what you're asking. It wasn’t quite as...graphic...as whatever that was, but-”

“I had no orders,” he says by way of an explanation he feels he probably should not be obligated to give.

“Orders.”

“Yes. In the absence of new orders, I made the decision I thought best.”

“You thought wrong.”

“You may say so.”

“And I say you don't listen worth a shit. Did I not say we are a team?”

She had, in fact, said such nonsense. Not that Charon believes her. These little kindnesses she shows, they are all pretense, all a fine veneer that thinly covers the monster she either is or will become. Charon has seen employers play such games, and those ones always ended up being the worst.

“You did.”

“Well, I meant it. What if you got hurt? Or killed?”

Charon killed. Charon. By three strung out raiders. The very thought is ridiculous in the utmost. But she is serious, hands on her hips and looking like she may want to fight.

It hits him like a bolt out of the blue, and Charon understands that she worries about him.

As she should.

He is an excellent investment, after all.

 

**********

 

His Mistress stops on the outskirts of a dilapidated town, ducks into a house with a quick jimmy of the lock and the dog clears the rooms. Satisfied that nothing is lurking, she motions him to sit at a ruined kitchen table, and he obliges. She somehow gets the stove going and cooks what must pass as a lunch, singing the off-key song about 'ticky-tacky' houses and swaying to a beat only she can seem to hear.

Charon steels himself for it. He seems to be catching on. Why or how, he does not understand, but it is her. It is all her fault.

_She cooks dinner, like she does every night, listening to the radio crooning out a song of love and want and rejection. Her hips tick side to side, even and measured as any metronome, but too sinuous to be simple rhythm. He sneaks up and puts his arms around her waist, and when she leans back into his chest, she smells like soap and soft heat and something that could never have a name._

Her hips are still moving and she is still singing and he wants to throw something heavy at her.

" _There's a green one, and a pink one, and a blue one, and a yell...ow_ ," she trails off as she turns and sees his fists clenched on the table.

"You okay?"

He somehow finds his voice.

"Yes."

She does not look convinced, but lets it go.

They have an odd, post-apocalyptic picnic, complete with fried apples and dog meat (not the most terrible meal he has ever had, but also not very good), and two bottles of beer nicked from the refrigerator, which are surprisingly cool. She, however, pronounces it 'disgusting' and charitably gives her bottle to him to drink.

After they finish their lunch and leave the house, she says cryptically, 'We're going around back. Watch out for hot potatoes.'

He tries, but sets a landmine off anyway.

There are two things one can do after accidentally triggering a landmine. One can, A) run like hell, or B) try to defuse it. Charon, with hands like bear paws, has never been good with delicate work. He is talented at blowing things up, not keeping them from exploding.

He turns to run, and his Mistress flashes by him, right towards the mine. He twists to grab her around the waist and haul her back, but she has slipped under his arm with a quickness he did not know she possessed. She scoops the mine up out of the dirt, pops up a lever, and tweaks something tiny between her fingers.

The landmine falls silent and she grins. "20 caps, easy!" she says, hefting it in her hand as if trying to guess its weight.

"K," she says brightly, "I'll go first. Cover me? Sniper up top. Real bastard. Stay away from the cars. They explode. Fire, sharp metal. Fucking hurts." She is speaking too quickly, clipping the extraneous words out of her sentences, like she has taken a whole pack of Mentats. Charon can feel the energy humming like a live wire and knows it is not chems, but nerves that makes her this way.

She apparently does not lack for bravery, even in the face of fear. Whether she will use it wisely or kill herself with it, he cannot tell. Why she did not just hire a merc to do her dirty work or have Charon blow himself up doing it, like any other self-respecting employer, he also could not fathom.

"Yes, Mistress. I will cover you."

She grins, the one with the sharp edges, and she hands him her hunting rifle and three boxes of rounds.

His Mistress travels in a vaguely serpentine fashion, quietly clearing mines with calm, practiced movements. It is fascinating to watch. She has a certain ritual that she repeats for each and every ordnance. Stalking up in movements surprisingly fluid for being crouched, she gets just within its four foot pressure zone, and as it starts to beep, takes two quick strides and pounces on it. In one smooth, continuous motion, she snatches it up and and rips out whatever tiny piece of something that allows it to explode.

She did not lie; sniper rounds snap past, but judging from their trajectory and general sloppiness, the shooter is likely exhausted or strung out on chems. Charon returns his shots with the hunting rifle until he gets close enough to use the slug shells in his shotgun. The loud report and exploding building plaster seem to cool the sniper's ardor.

His cover fire allows her to sneak into a blind spot, and he goes to follow her, but freezes as she throws up a fist.

"Too many taters," she calls softly. She gives an odd hand gesture that almost looks like a salute, two fingers swept toward him and emphatically down, and the dog migrates warily to his side. It does not generally come near him, only once to sniff the hand his Mistress asked him to present. But perhaps since Charon had not made an effort to be friendly, the dog feels it does not need to either.

And now Charon is thinking of the dog as a person. Apparently, his Mistress’s madness is catching.

Charon would prefer to go first, to keep his employer safe, but he understands. With his big, heavy boots, he will set off every mine in the vicinity and blow them all to hell and then sky high. The best he can do is try not get his employer killed.

Charon does not like it.

He roams the outside of the building taking potshots at the sniper, who Charon is surprised to find is just an old man. A rat-tat-tat snaps out and the sniper rounds stop. A body falls off the balcony at Charon’s feet, and he dispassionately regards this vanquished enemy of hers.

The man is old and bent and thin, but it is the whipcord thinness of strength that comes with hard living. Charon sees the scars of where a slave collar used to be, and wonders if she had been tasked with his execution by a former owner.

She whoops in victory, doing a ridiculous dance on the topmost story of ruined building, holding the sniper rifle over her head like a trophy.

"All clear!" she yells, skipping down the steps, arms laden with whatever she could carry from the sniper perch. "I've always wanted one of these," she says, stroking the stock of the sleek rifle.

"He was old," Charon observes.

"Yeah. A real fuck-knuckle.”

“A former slave," he elaborates, and she blanches as he points to the telltale scarring on the old man’s neck.

“Humans go feral too. Some easier than ghouls.” She looks into his face as if seeking his approval.

Charon says nothing because there is nothing to say. He may disagree, for all the good it will do, but she can kill as many doddering old men as she likes. While she is no Ahzrukhal, not yet anyway, what she does or does not do is no concern of his.

Her eyes narrow as she takes his silence for disapproval, which it is.

"He gave me this," she points to the long scar above her eye, the one thin enough to look almost delicate. "This too." She pulls up a pant leg and shows him her other leg, the one not kicking idly when she was lying in bed at Carol’s. It sports a truly spectacular scar, the kind that only comes from thermal or chemical burns. The wavy, puckered kind with divots of missing muscle covered over by modern medicine and fervent prayers. Starting at the bottom of her kneecap, it covers the whole shin, disappearing down into her boot. How she did not lose the leg altogether is a miracle.

“Ugly, isn’t it?” Twisting her leg at the knee,she puts the whole thing on display, making sure he can see how it curls around to the back. “No more pretty dresses for me.”

He thought that she would drop her pant leg and that would be the end of it, but she pokes at the shiny scar and babbles instead.

“See? Landmines don't care who they blow up. Could have been a kid. Or Dogmeat. Or you. He didn't care, either. And somehow, God forgot about him. But I didn't forget. I never forget."

“So you play God? You decide who needs punished?” Charon cannot believe the things that have been coming out of his mouth lately. He would never argue with an employer like this, but she draws things out of him like pulling at a loose thread.

“ _Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord, ‘I shall repay_ ,” she quotes calmly. “Well, there’s no God here. Bastard’s up and left.”

“So that gives you the right-”

“Maybe you should ask Ahzrukhal how he liked you playing God,” she says sharply.

Charon has nothing to say to this, because it is true. He had always held himself aloof and apart from other people's petty rages and revenges, but now he knows it was just a hypocrisy that made his conscience rest a little easier.

“Ahzrukhal hurt you,” she says, her voice and eyes soft, storm turned to quiet rain. “So you hurt him back, and that's the way it should be.”

She tips up her little face to look into his, and there is something in her eyes, something wild in its calm, like the eye of a storm and the devestation left behind it and the more that is surely yet to come.

“Nietzsche was right, big guy. God is dead. So that just leaves us.”

 

**********

 

A few more days of travel, and he finds that in addition to being crazy, violent, and vengeful, she is also much too nice for her own good.

A filthy child runs up to her, wailing about ‘those things’ and not making a bit of sense. However, his Mistress, patient as a saint of old, crouches down to his level and holds his hands, drawing information out of the snot-nosed brat like poison from a wound. He is quiet, but finally looks up and notices Charon and goes into another round of hysterics. His Mistress soothes his ruffled feathers, insisting Charon is in fact, a friend and not a monster at all.

Charon knows both of these things to be untrue, but says nothing because no one asked him his opinion.

Once the boy stops caterwauling, she stuffs him in a preservation shelter for safekeeping, along with some food and bottles of water. Charon does not like the way her mouth is set in a thin line. It looks like trouble.

She simply says, “Let’s go kill some ‘fuckin’ ants'.”

 

**********

 

They finally find the infamous Dr. Lesko, and the more she talks with him, the angrier she gets. The doctor has no remorse for destroying an entire town, killing whole families, or leaving a young boy to die alone. However, instead of yelling, she gets very quiet, the prickling stillness before a sky-shattering storm. She is silent as they leave to dispatch the ants guarding the queen.

“I’ll kill him.”

She says it quietly and with such fervent conviction, it echoes through the tunnel much louder than it should. This doctor had not harmed her personally, and yet his very existence somehow _offends_ her. Charon has heard many employers make such threats, but this soft voice, full of thinly veiled hate and promises of destruction, chills his blood.

She could be a demon if she chose.

He moves with her, silent, not wishing to come to her notice when she is in such a vicious mood. They kill the ant guardians, and in this case, he finds that her love of stealth is very useful. They do not even see her coming before she pops six quick rounds in each of their heads, neat as a stiff drink.

She hacks the console after a few attempts and sends out the pulse that should destroy the ants above ground. Done with the computer, a frown flits across her features.

“Charon?”

“Yes?”

“If you were me, what would you do?”

“I do not understand your question.”

“Well, would you kill the good doctor to keep this from _ever_ happening again? Or would you just _hope_ that this doesn’t happen again.”

He thinks about her question, and whether it is a rhetorical one or if she actually wishes for an answer. She is looking expectantly up into his face, patiently waiting.

An actual answer, then. Most employers do not want an actual answer. They want to hear whatever will make them feel better. This one though, this one seems crazy enough to actually want Charon's answer.

“I would kill every living thing in this tunnel and some that are above.”

“Are you sure? Killing an unarmed man would be terrible karma…”

“It does not matter what I think, but lack of a gun makes him no less a murderer.”

She is still looking up into his face, searching for something. Whatever it was, her smile seems to say she found it.

“Charon?”

“Yes?”

“What you think does matter.”

He has nothing to say to this, but stores it away to think about later.

 

**********

 

She approaches Dr. Lesko with a smile so bitter it could be poison, but the doctor is too stupid to recognize the harbinger of his death in her expression. Charon expects her to just shoot him in the face and be done with it, but to his surprise, she does not.

She talks to him.

His Mistress winds her way around the conversation like choking vines, only allowing certain answers in the traps of words she sets. Dr. Lesko gives her a strange lab coat and a dubious injection, which makes her shiver and blink her eyes experimentally. Their pupils widen and then focus, and she whips her gun up and shoots him, a simple triple tap, but it is more than enough. The doctor dies quickly, and the expression of confusion on his face looks like it belongs there.

"Good riddance," Charon says, and he wholeheartedly believes it.

She stares down at the pool of blood that is growing to a size that marks certain death, and whispering so softly, Charon has to strain to catch her words.

“ _Their feet are swift to shed blood, ruin and misery mark their path, and the way of peace they refuse to know._ ”

She does not look at him, only having eyes for the pool of blood that is making rivers of the cracks in the floor.

“That's the first thing I ever killed that wasn’t trying to kill me first. Does that make me a bad person?”

He does not think this question is addressed to him, and he does not have an answer anyway, so he keeps silent.

If this makes her a bad person, he does not want to know what sort of person he is.

 

**********

 

She goes back to fetch the boy, but it is not as simple as snatching him up and taking him somewhere else.

The boy refuses to come with them, and Charon is relieved. The open Wasteland is no place for a child. But then again, neither is a corpse-strewn house with a burning pile of rubble in the living room.

The boy bravely says he needs to bury his father's body. Picking up a shovel that is taller than he is, he trudges toward the backyard.

His Mistress stands there, silent and staring, gears and cogs completely still, but in a few quick steps she has one hand on the boy’s thin shoulder and the other has gently taken the shovel and set it down. “Stay here, sweetie,” she says, and the boy does.

Charon can only stand there as she strides up to him, and she is angry, which is all the more confusing because her enemies are dead, and he has no idea who is left that she could be angry with. Her eyes are snapping electric, and if Charon had thought her dangerous in the tunnels, she is fucking terrifying now.

“Can you keep a lookout for any more ants?” she asks calmly, voice smooth and very much at odds with the storm in her eyes. “I don't trust that asshat’s science any further than I could throw him.”

He wonders why she let him shoot her up with that syringe if she did not trust his science, but no one asked him.

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” she says, shouldering a sledgehammer she had found in one of the buildings. She stalks to a neighboring house, quietly shuts the door behind her, and proceeds to lose her mind.

Crashes and howls, dull thuds and screams - it sounds as if a pack of deathclaws might be waging war in the living room.

The boy, frightened as he is of Charon, is more frightened by the animalistic shrieks echoing out of the house. Holding onto the dog's ruff with both hands, he stays as close as he dares to Charon’s side.

“Is she okay?” he finally asks.

“I do not know,” Charon replies, but thinks that no, she is probably not ‘okay’.

The front door is knocked off its hinges and sails onto the sidewalk. An upstairs window shatters as a coffee table is flung through it. A chair follows and splinters into four separate pieces when it hits the concrete. Pillows, kitchen cabinets, parts of bed frames, shelves, tables, chunks of a bannister, blankets, pieces of carpeting, fluff from what must be eviscerated mattresses, what Charon thinks might have been a rollerskate - anything and everything that could be knocked loose with a sledgehammer and a bottomless well of rage - all tumble into the street below like the house had finally gotten so sick of the apocalypse it had actually vomited.

And then there is silence.

The boy, the dog, and Charon all stand together, staring at the doorway to see what kind of monster might emerge.

But it is just his Mistress. She steps daintily around the destruction as if she and the beast who had torn an entire house apart could not possibly be the same creature. But even as her cheeks are flushed and her hair is damp with exertion, the storm in her eyes is spent.

She delicately begins to arrange the wreckage into a pile, and Charon finally understands what she is trying to do.

Charon stands rooted to the ground. All this trouble for a dead body. He cannot understand it.

“You gonna help me, good-for-nothing?” she says to him in a teasing voice as she tries to wrestle with the broken headboard, but the smile she gives him is tight and fragile, so he takes the headboard from her and makes a pile large enough to turn a body to ash.

“What are you gonna do?” the boy asks, looking anxiously at the mountain of broken furniture as tall as Charon. It had taken them almost an hour to build, but his Mistress seemed to be in no particular hurry to get anywhere, so by default, Charon is not either.

“We’re going to light a fire. To set him free.” She looks at him with soft eyes and a gentle hand around the side of his head, thumb tucking the shaggy blonde hair behind his ear, and the boy is young enough to lean into the contact rather than pull away. “In the old days, way before the war, this is how kings had their funerals. Now he’ll be everywhere you go.”

The boy says nothing, staring at the pile.

“The ground’s too hard, sweetie. Even Charon would have trouble digging, and we're both too small.”

The boy thinks a moment, but in the way children are vastly more resilient than adults, he squares his shoulders and juts out his jaw. “Good,” he says simply. “The animals would just dig him up anyway.“

His Mistress blanches but says nothing. She douses the pile with a tank of flamer fuel dug from the depth of her pack (even though she does not possess a flamethrower), letting it soak into the wood and cloth. Taking an old sheet and a few lengths of electrical cord, she leaves the boy on the street with a stern command to stay outside and a motion to the dog to guard him.

“I’m gonna need your help again, big guy. I’m sorry.”

He says nothing because he does not know what to say, but follows her into the house, carefully shutting the door behind him. The scent of decomposing corpse smacks him in what is left of his nose, and looking at the bloated, rigored body, he understands and appreciates his Mistress’s delicacy.

The world and everything in it may be rotten, but there is no reason a child should be forced see something like that if they do not have to.

She puts on her leather gloves and water-soaked bandana around her face to keep out the smell and offers him one as well, but he declines. The miasma of death is not anything new. Arranging the body with all the care and gentleness one might use for a live one, she only furrows her brows when she finds the elbow joints less than cooperative, but finally gets the limbs in some semblance of repose. The face, however, will not settle into anything but a grimace of pain and fear, so she sighs and settles for closing the eyelids.

“I refuse to live like an animal,” she tells Charon quietly as she trusses up the sheet-wrapped body with electrical cord like the picture of a pre-war ham he had seen once. “I won’t. They can’t make me.”

Who ‘they’ is, Charon does not know, but what he does know is that the Wasteland breaks everyone eventually.

She picks up the body at the shoulders, and asks him to get the feet. After her sledgehammer episode, she is weak, so he picks the body up himself and takes it outside. He contemplates tossing it on top like just another piece of wood, but it does not seem right somehow, so he climbs up a bit and carefully lays it down on the door she had placed at the top as a makeshift bier.

“Thank you,” she says, giving his wrist a quick squeeze, and he almost jumps out of what skin he has left.

She lights the pyre at the bottom, and Charon is surprised how slowly the fire builds. They all stand there, staring into the flame until it rages, sending sparks and ash into the sky. The boy solemnly adds more fuel and furniture pieces, keeping the bonfire fed. Soon it is dark, and still the fire burns, and still they sit and watch it, his Mistress and the boy sitting close with the dog between them, both absently petting its fur.

Charon sits on the curb with his elbows on his knees, shotgun resting across the tops of his boots, but there is nothing here to harm them. In a silence like this, nothing would dare. He thinks the boy would fall asleep, but he lasts much longer than Charon expected. Head pillowed on the dog, he does finally nod off in the early hours of the morning, just as the stars and fire are fading. The body is gone, like it had never been there at all, and perhaps it is as his Mistress had said.

Fred Wilks is now everywhere and nowhere all at once.

His Mistress gets up, motioning the dog to be still, but like a true creature of the Wasteland, the boy is a light sleeper and wakes immediately.

“You're leaving,” he says rather than asks.

“Yeah, we've got to go. You said you had an aunt in Rivet City?”

“Yeah, Vera Weatherly, but I never met her. She probably don't want me anyway.”

His Mistress says nothing, but leaves him with all the food and water in her pack.

“I will find somewhere for you, I promise,” she says, already large eyes now huge in the dying starlight, and the boy looks like he believes her.

Charon’s mind explodes for a moment, and it hurts.

_“You promised!” she wails, throwing herself at him, beating her small fists against his chest. There is nothing he can say or do to fix this, so he just holds her as she rages and his heart breaks._

Charon makes his face into granite and hopes his Mistress realizes just how easily promises can be broken.


	11. Bullet Wounds and Thank You's

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inpiration brought to you by:
> 
> Never Mess With Sunday - Yppah  
> No Trouble - Other Lives  
> Far Away - Jose Gonzalez  
> Give It All Away - Zero 7  
> Wind Song - Fabrizio Paterlini

“Fuck you, fuck you, _FUCK YOU_!” she screams as she rolls around on the ground, clawing at her eyes, and if his Mistress had not almost been killed, it would have been one of the funniest things Charon has seen or heard in decades.

They have just come out of a subway tunnel when they are ambushed by Talon Company mercenaries. How this slip of a girl has warranted a contract out on her life, Charon cannot begin to fathom.

He cannot say who specifically is at fault for this fiasco, but if anyone is to blame, it is his employer. She refuses to let him be, as she so elegantly put it, a 'meat shield' and clear the way. With exceptional eyesight, especially in the dark, he thinks she has somehow been, _enhanced_. No normal human should be able to sense enemies from so far away.

That, in and of itself, is a useful thing, but she has come to rely on it. Stepping out into harsh daylight after being in dark tunnels for days at a time has temporarily blinded her. A Talon merc gets the drop on her, giving her skull a good whack with a baseball bat, and it is only the plate in her head that keeps her brain in one piece.

Charon repays in kind and blows her assailant’s head off.

She, however, is both concussed and pissed.

“So fucking stupid, Charon!” she slurs, her words sticking together as blood courses down her neck.

“Yes,” he agrees, the _blat_ of his shotgun drowning out any other reply. He hears the _rat-tat-tat_ of her assault rifle and while she is up, he knows her aim must be terrible. She listens carefully, head cocked off to one side like the dog, and takes off, skidding over to his cover of thick concrete.

“Why is only one shooting?” she asks, her eyes still squinting.

“The others have either run out of ammunition or prefer melee combat. Both may have grenades.”

“What should we do?”

He thinks about it. She is close to useless in this state, limbs too loose and floppy, eyeballs jerking in their sockets. She has already jammed a stimpak home behind her ear with practiced efficiency, and while it will heal the injury, a concussion simply needs time and rest.

Also, he really just wants to tear something apart with his bare hands.

“You will follow my recommendation?”

“Of course,” she says immediately and without hesitation.

Charon looks at her skeptically. If her past actions are any indication, she is not going to like what he has to say. The promises she makes do seem important to her, so if he can get her to make one, perhaps she will be more tractable.

“I have your word that you will do exactly as I suggest?”

“I promise.”

“I will kill them all, and you will stay here with the dog.”

The thundercloud appears, but she remembers that she has promised. She bites her lip between her teeth like it owes her money, and if the rest of her expression had not been radiating worry, the action would have seemed flirtatious. But she _is_  worried. It is set into the line of her shoulders, the tilt of her brow, and for a moment, Charon thinks she will stubbornly refuse.

“Please be careful.”

Charon can count on one hand the times someone has told him to be careful and none have added a 'please'.

He takes a moment to clear his mind, and bursts into action.

The tactical lessons stamped onto the back of his skull demand he dispose of the most immediate threat first in such an open battlefield. His adrenaline spikes as a round whistles past his ear, and he welcomes that familiar itch in his fingertips as the battle-chemicals flood his brain and set fire to his nerves. The two 10mm rounds that bury themselves in his left shoulder make him grunt withpain. His shoulder is stiff, and he can feel something grind when he moves it, but tamps down the pain to deal with later. For now, it is simply an irritation.

The one that punches through his chest right below his last rib is more concerning. The deep breath that hitches says his lung may be nicked, but it is only uncomfortable to breathe, not impossible. It certainly does not stop him from spattering the merc's torso against the concrete in a delicious explosion of red.

While Charon has grown so accustomed to killing that it barely registers anymore, he has to admire how the brilliant crimson contrasts on the dull grey pavement, a poignant study of life transforming to death in the space of a moment.

Combat recommendations filter through his brain and he picks through them, sorting and sifting until he finds the ones he is looking for. Grenades are at the top of his list of concerns; anything else is a low obstacle to simply be stepped over. Sauntering up to the two mercs, he stows his shotgun. Drawing it is an exercise in fractions of seconds for him now. He cracks his knuckles and shows his teeth in what could be construed as a grin, but is not. One merc takes the bait, but the other is too cautious, and hunkers down behind cover.

One on one then. A little disappointing, but he will take what he can get. Oh, he _could_ just shoot them both and be done with it, but he has been so tightly leashed for ages, and the urge to pull something apart with his hands is irresistible in this gentle haze of endorphins. And besides, is it not good manners to play on an even field? But Charon knows almost any battlefield he plays on is never an even one.

The merc runs at him with a badly maintained combat knife, and for the smallest of moments, Charon almost feels sorry for him. It passes, and Charon grabs the knife arm with his own uninjured one. While his left hand is dominant, he is just as effective with the other. Twisting and pulling, he uses his opponent’s momentum to his own advantage. Charon pulls the wrist, nestling the merc's elbow point against his shoulder and with a quick lunge and tug, the captive arm bends in a direction contrary to its physiology. The muffled yet sharp snap of a freshly destroyed elbow joint, so inherently wrong and unnatural, rings out louder than it should, and Charon realizes he has _missed_ this. Not being the quintessential thug, tossing people out of shitty bars - but actual hand to hand combat - war in its purest and most finely distilled form. He kicks out and down, the heavy sole of his boot connecting with the side of a knee and he hears that crack too.

The screaming he stopped hearing a while ago.

What he does hear that does not belong is the _tink-tink-tink_ of a thrown grenade. It is surprising that a comrade would sentence a fellow brother to death-by-shrapnel - Charon had thought Talon Company more organized than that - but self-preservation will trump friendship every single time. Letting his opponent fall, he sprints away from the ordnance and right at its thrower, knocking him down with a powerful kick to the chest. Charon rolls the stunned merc onto his stomach and pins him to the ground with two knees dug firmly into each shoulder joint.

And then Charon methodically smashes the merc’s face into the concrete. No sense wasting ammunition, and while he had considered using the butt of his gun, that kind of melee tended to knock the sights askew. This enemy squirms and screams at first, but each one sounds wetter and more congested until only wheezes and gurgles and the crackle of shattered bone remain, so loud in the silence. The twitching stops, and Charon gets to his feet and stalks back to his Mistress, but not before giving the back of the merc’s head a vicious stomp, and is thoroughly satisfied when the skull gives way completely under his boot.

He expects such a soft, small thing such as herself to be retching with disgust at his display of savagery. The raider spilling his guts like a badly kept secret had been retaliation for the indignity of being bitten. This bit of savagery is simply for the fun of it. And maybe a little bit of him _wants_ her to be afraid, to fear the beast of blood and death she had purchased.

But she has not even flinched.

"Guess I've got some things to learn," she says, looking at him like he is some new kind of creature. He does not know if this is good or bad. Charon is used to being stared at - he is a mountain of corpse after all - but not stared at with interest and dare he say, _appreciation_.

Her thundercloud returns as she notices how he holds his left arm. He is pleased to see that her pupils are returning to normal, as she will be able to defend herself should there be more enemies, but he does not like the way they appear to stare through him.

"You're hurt." She rips open her pack and produces a lunchbox-turned-first aid kit, snapping it open and reaching for him. He automatically recoils, but she softly says, "I can help.”

Charon does not want her help and he does not need it. He has been taking care of himself for two centuries. A flare of something he has not felt for years bubbles up, hot and insistent. It takes a moment to put a name on it, but it is sheer stubbornness.

"I can take care of it. It is no trouble." He has the more than generous supply of stimpaks she insisted on pressing into his hands. 'Just in case,' she kept saying, until every free pocket in his armor rattled with them.

He expects her to argue, but she flicks a hand out at him. "Fine, be that way." She tosses him the lunchbox and he finds it is not a first aid kit at all, but a portable surgical set. The edges of the lunchbox are cleverly sealed with a length of surgical tubing to keep the dust out and has pieces he recognizes, but also some things that look positively sinister. He can see scratches and dents on the tiny tools, but each is polished within an inch of its life, more clean and shiny than anything in this Wasteland had any right to be.

“You’ll need to take the bullets out," she says matter of factly. "A stimpak will just heal right over it and you’ll be sorry.”

She is irritating, telling him things he already knows. Charon had planned on using his combat knife to dig out the slugs, but if he is perfectly honest with himself, that does not sound nearly as nice as clean tools and clever fingers.

"Oh, and the wheezing? It's because your lung's punctured and filling with blood."

He growls softly as that stubbornness reasserts itself. He is not made of glass. He is not dead weight, some soft creature to be coddled and fussed over.

Charon can take care of himself, damn it.

Sliding the combat knife out of his boot with an audible _snick_ , he stretches to reach the wound. This is going to be awkward. He is ambidextrous, yes, but his injured arm is still dominant. While two bullets have thankfully gone in and out, the other is still lodged deep, just below his outer collarbone. The entry wound is smaller than he thought, and he is sure the exit wounds are not pretty. Worst of all, the adrenalin is waning and his chest feels tight and heavy.

He had forgotten how much this will hurt.

His Mistress is suddenly in front of him, thundercloud absolutely wrathful, and for a moment, he thinks she will strike him. As much as Charon reiterates that physical violence voids the contract, only one in his two hundred years of servitude had dared,and that employer was dead before he hit the ground. She does not, but has put her hand on his arm, a dangerous place to be when he is wielding a knife.

She does not seem to care.

"I don't like telling you what to do, but goddammit, put that knife down and let me help."

She has given him a command, and he feels his muscles betray him, like they always do. He wants to knock her on her ass and be left alone, but neither of those things are possible.

"As you wish," he says with a sigh, slipping the knife back into his boot.

His Mistress wrinkles her nose at him and grins. "Are all men so stubborn, or are you just special?" she quips, and surprises him by pulling out a package of Mentats. She had not seemed the type to be an addict, but he has been wrong about things like this before.

“Mentats are a stimulant, a concussion acts as a depressant, take the two together and they cancel each other out, for a little while, anyway,” she explains. "The hangover is horrific though." She grimaces as she quickly chews them up and bolts them down. “Tastes like soap."

She makes him peel off the top half of his armor and she whistles a strange, descending note through her teeth as her eyes roam over his torso. What she can possibly mean by it, he does not know. The whistle is bitten off as her jaw clenches hard enough to creak and her narrowed eyes dart up to his face, as if caught looking at something she should not.

Ah. What sickens her is the scars of badly healed bullet holes, burns, and knife wounds that riddle his torso like a road map. Or maybe it is the patches of skin and exposed muscle that looks like an atlas of morbid nations made of pale and red.

"Fuckers use you for target practice?" Her voice is almost a growl.

He cannot quite still the twitch of surprise. She is not disgusted. She is angry. Not even at him. She is angry _for_ him.

“No, only combat."

"Meat-shield duty, you mean," she mutters, collecting herself and turning him this way and that, clinically looking him over. "Okey-dokey!" she says. "It's not so bad. Might sting a little, though."

His Mistress doses his lung first and his breathing eases. She pours the bottle of disinfectant over her hands and viciously scrubs them together, cleaning under her already clean and short fingernails. The very act of washing her hands seems to steady her. Mumbling under her breath, she inventories her supplies. "Forceps...spreaders...scalpel...hemostats...Sit, sit!" she scolds, flapping her hands at him.

Charon obeys, but does not like it.

“Should we not find a safer place to do this?”

She shakes her head. “I don't like fixing things up in the tunnels. Smells like infection. Shit falling down from the ceiling..." She shudders. “Nope. I don't like the way the sun burns, but at least it burns clean.”

His Mistress is insane, but on some level, Charon thinks he might understand. But all the tiny tools are making him nervous. It should not take so many nasty-looking instruments to remove one small bullet. He sits with his back against a wall, long legs splayed out in front of him.

And he is stunned when she drops to her knees and straddles his left thigh with her own two slim ones and _sits on it._

Her left knee is dangerously close to some very sensitive anatomy that has decided to have a mind of its own, made worse by the fact that she is close enough to smell, a surprisingly inoffensive scent, the simple yet unique note of healthy human skin laced with dust and salt and an indefinable something else. He freezes, stock still, and so intent on looking at his wounds, she does not even notice.

That she would willingly get so close to him is positively confounding.

She looks at him, eyes flicking everywhere, gears and cogs ratcheting up. "How much do you weigh?"

He does not know, and the fact that what makes her female is perched on his thigh is stealing more of his brain’s processing power than he cares to admit. "250? 300? Maybe more."

"Ugh," she growls. "You're a fucking giant." She is mumbling again, rattling off numbers and equations so fast it sounds like a foreign language. "300 pounds is 150ish kilos, 5 units per kilo is 750 units."

His Mistress peers at him. "You're a ghoul too, huh. Barrows says ghouls need double." The gears turn some more, turning, turning, always turning, like they could never stop. It is like a sickness she has. "1500 units! It's like you're a brahmin."

He has no idea what she is talking about, but it sounds ominous.

"I do not-"

"Arm, please," she says in a singsong voice. He gingerly presents his arm with no small amount of trepidation, and her fingers are on his wrist, gently turning it palm up. 

“Jeez, I’m not gonna cut it off. Have a little faith, huh?” Cool fingers gently press along the crook of his arm. It is a dangerous place, full of arteries, and she snorts with amusement as she lightly pokes at an exposed vein. "Like a fire hose. Well, that will make it easier." Before he can protest, she has shot him full of enough Med-X to kill a large human three times over.

The drug hits him like a wall of water, dragging him down to a place so soft it should not exist at all. His head swims and he has an irrational thought that he might be melting.

"That was not..." he is drowning now, unable to keep his head above the surface, "necessary," he finishes lamely as he feels himself wilt.

"And have you squirm? Nuh-uh. I prefer my patients when they're staying the fuck still."

Charon had been angry with her, but now he just does not _care_.

She sets to work with her multitude of tools, flaying open what is left of his skin, and he watches with a strange sort of detachment, fascinated by the deft movements of her fingers.

“Shiny,” he observes dunkenly as his blood coats what looks like a pair of tiny scissors, a layer so thin the silver metal gleams through, turning the red into something else.

“Yep, Abraxo. Nastiest cleaner around, but it does a hell of a job on germs. Hey! You got a bee on you!” she says in surprise, minutely studying the point of his shoulder.

Charon grunts in acknowledgement. He has seen the tattoo before, miraculously positioned on a patch of intact skin, but he does not know where it came from or its significance.

“Well, what’s it for?”

“I do not know.”

She pulls back and looks at him critically. “In Greek mythology, bees are a symbol of souls travelling to the underworld.”

Bees. He has never actually seen one, that he can remember. Bees mean nothing to him, although there is a little scratching thought that they _should_ mean something. He shrugs and immediately regrets it.

“Sit still!” she says, _tsk_ -ing through her teeth at him. “You want me to cut something important?”

‘Anyway,” she continues her infernal digging, “it’s not just a bee, it’s a coin with a bee on it. An _obol_ , a coin to pay for the ferry ride. You know about the ferry, right? Across the Acheron? The River of Woe? The Ferryman who sails the boat?”

“Yes.”

“You, sir, are a masterful conversationalist.”

“You talk enough for both of us.” It is a simple and undeniable truth.

His Mistress huffs a laugh but keeps working with her steady, clever fingers and Charon decides he likes them. Likes the bony knuckles and rounded fingertips and the littlest one on the left that never straightens all the way. He likes how they can do soft things like tuck orphaned children’s hair behind their ears and close the eyelids of corpses. How they open locks and tame landmines and turn pages of books. How they curl around the trigger of her rifle and the handle of her knife.

Charon especially likes how they had put a bottlecap in his hand and tried to free him.

He knows he is drowning in drugs, but in this moment, Charon finds himself absolutely _besotted_ with her fingers.

"Bullet shattered against your scapula," she says apologetically, like she had shot him herself, which really, she might as well have. And in true inebriated fashion, his thoughts flit to how absolutely stupid a smart person could be. Why does she refuse to use him properly?

"It is your fault," he hears himself say calmly. "You refuse to let me fulfill my function. It is.." He searches his brain for the right word, but soaked in Med-X, it is no better than stumbling in the dark. "Insulting," he finally manages.

She dips her head, whether in embarrassment or apology, he cannot tell.

His Mistress keeps pulling out tiny pieces of metal, dropping them into his outstretched hand. It is surprising how many there are. "There you are, you little fucknut!" she breathes, pulling out a particularly stubborn bit with a pair of impossibly small tweezers. "Last one!" She drops it in his hand and he is struck by how something so tiny could cause so much trouble.

Like her.

She gently washes the wounds with a bottle of irradiated water and doses them with a handful of stimpaks, watching in fascination as the flesh closes up.

"Man, that gets me every time! You'd think I'd be used to it by now."

He snorts and feels better than he has in years. "You often pull bullets from your employees?"

This startles a laugh from her. "No, but watching skin heal up right before your eyes never gets old. I've pulled enough metal out of myself to know the drill."

Her face falls and he wonders at the change. "I’m sorry," she says. "This _was_ my fault. I know you're some kind of super soldier, but you're still my responsibility."

Charon had never thought of it that way. He had always thought of himself as a weapon.

"I do not feel right, Mistress," he grumbles as darkness creeps in on the edges of his vision.

"Well, maybe your stubborn ass will sleep for once."

He has nothing to say to that simply because there is putty standing in for his brain, so he only grunts as he tries to claw his way upright.

It does not work.

"Yep, you’re officially fucked up. Come on." She holds out her hand and he grabs it with an unintelligible grumble that sounds nothing like what he wants to say, which is 'I do not require sleep'.

 

**********

 

Charon wakes slowly, tentatively testing each limb as the world comes back. He is lying on something relatively soft, and for once, his feet aren't hanging off the edge. The crackling scent of roasting meat filters through what's left of his nose, and his stomach reminds him of its continued existence by growling fiercely.  Opening a bleary eye, he sees her sitting cross-legged with her back to a wall, the dog at her feet. Her assault rifle is settled across the crook her legs and hips make, and she is reading one of the books she insists on carrying around.

She is reading aloud.

To the dog.

 _“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places. But those who will not break, it kills._ ”

Charon does not recognize the book she reads from, but it does not matter. Soft and low, the words and syllables that fall from her lips are round and smooth as river stones, but warm and complex as pre-war whiskey.

The drugs must have hit him harder than he imagined.

She continues and the dog listens, ears pitched forward at the sound of her voice.

“ _It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry._ ”

She sighs. “Baby-dog, that Hemingway was one depressing sonofabitch, but it’s true.”

He shifts to see her and hear the words and that voice better, and she catches his movement and smiles at him. "Hey, sleepy head!” she says, and the spell is broken. “Feeling better?"

"I overslept," he croaks.

His Mistress shrugs. "Nah. You needed it." She, for a wonder, does not seem upset. Any other employer would have never stood for such a thing. If he was injured, most would wait until they got to a radiation source rather than waste the stimpaks. Simply being tired was not an option.

However, in his defense, she did drug him to oblivion and back.

"I do not require sleep."

“You just passed the fuck out for eighteen hours, so don't give me that shit. Just sleep when you're supposed to, okay?"

He tries to swallow but finds he cannot. She motions to the bottle of irradiated water at his elbow. Gingerly sitting up, he takes a drink and is surprised when he does not get a mouthful of grit with it.

She grins like a cat who got the canary, but he can see tired shadows under her eyes.

"Why didn't you tell me that shit had floaties?! You just need to boil it and filter it through a shirt. All the radiation and none of the dirt!”

Charon looks at her in question.

"What? Ghouls like radiation, don't they?"

He nods in the affirmative and takes another swig and feels the familiar buzz of radiation slide down and chase away the drought that had formed in his throat. His stomach is getting impatient, and if he may say so, traitorous and spoiled, because it growls fiercely.

She gently closes the book and whispers something to it that sounds suspiciously like 'later, beautiful,' and darts to the door she has cleverly barricaded with a heavy pipe. "Be right back."

His Mistress returns with a green plate piled with grilled meat.

“Here ya go!”

Charon says nothing, because even in a million years, he could not think of a single thing to say.

"I could get you something else, Insta-Mash or mac n cheese..." she says, trailing off when he does not take it, awkwardly holding the plate out in front of her like a peace offering.

"Thank you," he finally says, spitting the words out because that is the only way to get them to leave his mouth.

He does not remember the last time anyone gave him a reason to be thankful about anything.

When she inevitably turns into the monster Charon knows she will, it is going to hurt a hell of a lot worse than being shot in the shoulder.

 

**********

 

“You are sure this is what you want, Mistress?”

"I need to get better at this. What if something happens?” She looks up into his face. “What if you're not there?"

"I follow you for good or ill. I protect your life with my life.”

"I know that, but accidents happen, and we both have the scars to prove it." She lightly fingers the long silvery scar above her left eyebrow.

"I still do not know if this is a good idea, Mistress."

“Physical violence voids the contract?”

How malleable the contract has become. Or perhaps it had always been this way. The employer who had struck him had not even hit him hard. Not even enough to leave a mark, just a backhand in anger, but that had been enough for Charon to snap his neck. This sparring will have her landing punches and kicks with twice as much force as that ill-advised slap.

“Not in this case, but you could be injured.”

“So don’t hurt me,” she says, as if that is the only logical answer that could possibly exist.

He sighs. She has not explicitly commanded him, but she does have a valid point.

“Very well. Stand up.”

“K, standing.”

“Not like that. Feet further apart.” He toes the instep of each tiny foot until they are hip width apart. “It will make you harder to knock over. Now put one foot back farther.”

“Which one?”

Had it always been this hard to teach someone? Had he even taught anyone anything before?

He searches, but his memories are empty of such a thing.

“It does not matter. Now, hands out in front, loose and ready to grab whatever gets too close to you.”

“K.”

He mirrors her position. “Open hands for practice. No fists.”

“K,” she repeats, relaxing her clenched fists. The intense look of concentration is still there, and the keen intelligence behind her eyes that tells him she is snapping up pieces of information at a shocking pace.

“You are quick, which is useful, but you are also very small, which is not.”

She growls at this but says nothing.

 

**********

 

His Mistress is spending a lot of time down in the dirt, but Charon is surprised at her resourcefulness. She takes the basic tenets of _krav maga_ , a type of gritty street fighting, and adapts it to her own size and weight. She is fast and flexible, and she grins with all her teeth, dancing out of his grasp a few times with a gleam of cunning. However, he is a walking weapon, and those moments are short lived.

“That may be enough for today, Mistress.”

“Oh my god, I thought you’d never say that,” she quips, eyes bright and cheeks red.

“You should have told me to stop.”

“What, and miss out on all that? I almost had you!”

Charon snorts. “Not in another two hundred years will you have even come close.”

She crinkles her eyes up and looks at him closely. “Smiling looks good on you.”

He had not realized he was smiling.

 

**********

 

"Is there a safe route to Rivet City?"

He mulls over her question. There is no such thing as a safe route to anywhere in the Wasteland, but there are some that one is less likely to be killed on than others.

Charon accesses the filing cabinets that his brain is comprised of. His conditioning ensures that he forgets nothing, filing and refiling information as obsessively as any good librarian. And as any good librarian knows the entire contents of their domain, he is always irritated with the wall he sometimes encounters, like a locked door or a boarded up passageway. Charon knows it hides _something_ , but exactly what, he cannot tell. He sighs and plucks out a memory of dirty, sun-warmed water quietly lapping at a shore, and a feeling of relative safety.

"Yes. Can you swim?"

Her face has gone both blank and pale under the freckles.

"Swim?" she squeaks. "In water?"

Her eyes are comically wide, but he sees that the panic in her face is genuine.

"You do not know how to swim?"

She shakes her head. "I splashed a little in a puddle once." She shudders at the memory and Charon thinks it is not the puddle that makes her cringe.

"We could take the tunnels through DC, but that way is not safe. If we swim, you will need Rad-X," he warns.

She flaps a hand at him. "Not me. Well, not a lot of it."

His face must express disbelief, because she flaps her hand again. "Had a little, ah, industrial accident. Bled out of my eyeballs, but got a nifty mutation. Any crippled limbs heal right up if I go above 600 rads."

His expression must not have changed. "I'm not a ghoul," she explains, "I just have a few useful adaptations. I still feel like shit, and I'd _probably_ die if I hit 1000 rads, but I have a little more resistance than most."

Charon decides he may have to lace her Dandy Boy Apples with Rad-X because she is too bat-shit insane to take care of herself.

She huffs at him and his skeptical silence. "Can you teach me to swim or not?"

He ponders this question. Swimming is something that can be learned, but not necessarily taught.

"I will try."

She claps her hands in delight like a child, and Charon is reminded just how young she is.

 

**********

 

How did he learn?

Charon wracks his brain, tearing up the cabinets and ransacking the whole library to get to the right memory. He comes up empty, and the only thing worse than failure is the fact that it has to be there, somewhere. He had to have learned once. No one just knows something. Most unbidden memories are useless, dangerous things, but the fact that he cannot remember is irritating.

"No, keep kicking your feet," he tells her absently.

"But my arms-"

"You have to move them all at the same time."

She redoubles her efforts, badly executed as they are. He has his hands under her midsection to keep her from sinking like a stone and drowning, but it appears that she is trying her damnedest to do both. She is moving like a pig in mud, all flailing arms and legs and grunts and splashes, and he just cannot take it anymore.

He laughs for the first time that he can remember. The sound scares him, but like water from a broken dam, it keeps on coming. She flips belly up and rests all her weight on his arms. Reaching up, she pats him fondly on the chest.

"Ass," she says, but with a smile that takes out any sting it might have.

This one takes him by surprise, and is all the more painful for its unexpectedness.

 

_"Make me float," she pleads. So he lifts her to the surface of the water, one hand at the small of her back, the other between her shoulder blades, and they both stare, her at the moon, and him at her face as the starlight makes blue flame of her eyes._

 

His fingers spasm and curl into her side and she looks at him in question.

“Are you al-”

“I am fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

 

_**********_

 

Charon settles into a lazy, distance-eating crawl and she does some ridiculous rendition of what is supposed to be a breaststroke. Her skill is not what is keeping her afloat. The lessons were mostly a bust, as she panicked and flailed whenever his hands left her. She, of course, solved her own problem by creating a flotation device out of a leather belt, and four bleach jugs filled with air and sealed with Wonderglue.

The mutt out-swims them all with an efficient dog paddle.

"This isn't so bad," she says, splashing much more than she probably needs to.

"You are not actually swimming," he points out. "You are floating, at best."

"Sure do know how to rain on a girl's parade. They teach you that in super soldier training?"

Charon knows she means it as a joke, but it is something he prefers not to remember if he can help it. He does not remember much of the actual process, but the bits and pieces still there are...painful. Intensely so, and those files are sequestered in a bin marked ‘Do Not Open.’

"No," he says in a tone he hopes will not encourage further conversation on the subject.

"Did it hurt?" she asks in a soft voice, keeping her splashes to a minimum. As always, she is dangerously perceptive.

"Yes, but it does not matter anymore." And for a wonder, she lets it be.

The way to Rivet City is surprisingly calm, their progress only hindered by local wildlife and the occasional badly aimed potshot from super mutants who would not come too near the shore.

A ragged man who appears close to death croaks at her about water.

She looks absolutely horrified. “I didn’t know," she whispers. "I mean, Micky yeah, but, _fuck_.” Charon has no idea what she is so worked up about. People die from dehydration all the time. She promptly gives the beggar all the purified water in her pack; the four bottles that she had painstakingly scavenged.

His astonishment at her charitability, which borders on stupidity, must be visible.

“What?” she says as they walk away from the beggar’s tearful ‘thank you’s’. “I can always get more. Wadsworth is always such a love.” Who Wadsworth is, Charon does not know, but what he does know is that his Mistress’s bleeding heart is going to get one or both of them killed.

They arrive and she slaps the comm and politely asks for entrance. A bridge swings out and all her previous bravery is gone.

"Holy shit, that's high up," she says, trying to both speak and hold her breath at the same time.  

She does not fear the dark and feels sorry for the ferals, but is somehow afraid of heights and water.

His Mistress is a strange creature indeed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Literature quoted:
> 
> A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway


	12. Our Ship Has Run Aground

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time to hear from Lucky, I think.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration brought to you by:
> 
> Opening - Philip Glass  
> Citizen of Glass - Agnes Obel  
> Bright - Stafraenn Hakim  
> Le souvenir des temps gracieux - Joep Beving  
> Easier - Mansionair  
> Beau - Martin Gauffin

The guard at the entrance to Rivet City has the most perfect face Lucky has ever seen. So pretty, it’s wrong somehow. 

“Can I help you?” he says in a voice that means he'd rather do anything but. His laser rifle is drawn, dangling loose from one hand, but Lucky keeps her own weapon holstered. She knows if he so much as twitches, Charon will blow his head off quicker than you could say ‘boom’.

“Not really,” she says, stepping around him.

The guard blocks her path. “We don't tolerate trouble here.”

“Do I look like trouble,” she reads his name badge, “Harkness?”

He stares at her, and his eyes look like clockwork.

“The worst kind.”

“Is it the hair?,” she asks, raking her fingers through it to make the fro-hawk stand straight up. Back at Our Lady Hope, she had almost shaved it all off. She couldn’t get the blood out,  _ couldn’t get it out,  _ but she also couldn't bring herself to give up that last little bit of the old her. Now, she has taken to braiding the uncontrollable tresses into something more manageable, but the swim had teased it apart, and the water had made a style all its own.

“No, it's the dead body you brought with you,” Harkness says.

Lucky finds Charon out of the corner of her eye to make sure he won’t twist the guard’s head off his neck, but he’s just standing there, arms crossed and looking unbearably bored. But Lucky sees the tiny muscle working in his jaw, the one that means he’s irritated.

She’s never wanted to rearrange someone’s too-perfect teeth so much in her whole life. 

But she needs in there. Bryan needs her in there, and she’ll be damned if some puss-faced bastard gets in her way. Violence is useless here, even though it's the most surefire way she knows to either solve a problem or start one. She likes how it’s so straightforward, so... _ decisive _ . A winner, a loser, and no in between. But as much as she wants to slam his overly perfect eyebrows into the decking, she can’t. She so much as slaps him and the whole city will be on her ass. So she turns on the charm.

“I’m too little to wander around by myself. My friend keeps me safe.”

Harkness seems to roll that around for a minute.

“You don't need protection inside Rivet City. It's the safest place in the Wasteland.”

“And if I get any more welcomes as nice as yours,” she says, looking pointedly at his finger on the rifle trigger, “I think I’ll need all the protection I can get.”

Harkness sighs like a martyr. “Fine. But you keep that…” he gives Charon a look of absolute disgust, “ _ thing,  _ on a tight leash, or you’ll find yourself face-down in the river. Are we clear?”

“Crystal.”

She pushes past him, Dogmeat on her left, low and slinking, and Charon on her right, huge and silent. While they're both quiet, she can tell Dogmeat likes the guard just about as much as she does. As always, Charon says nothing, but his eyes are hard and there’s a darkness there.

She ponders just exactly what she might do if she found Harkness alone in a dimly lit alley, and when she looks at Charon’s angry eyes, she thinks she has a good idea.

 

**********

 

Dogmeat does  _ not _ like this place. 

He remembers it, from the times his old god had brought him here to exchange containers that smelled of food and some of smoke for the jingly slivers of metal that these humans seem to like so much. Dogmeat will never understand humans’ preoccupation with them. They aren't any good to eat, not even to chew on.

But it’s the number of people here in this metal den, so very many of them. Too many to keep all their swirling scents separate and organized and it makes him dizzy. 

He especially does not like this place for the simple fact that Goddess and her Large-One seem to  _ detest  _ it.

They are both so nervous, a terrible, biting kind of nervous, nothing like the almost safe nervousness at the dens of Old-One and Machine-Parts. The not-human at the entrance was something Dogmeat has never not-smelled before. It had smelled like absolutely nothing and Dogmeat had done his best to be still and quiet, but to his shame, his nose had crinkled and his ruff had stood up. Everything smelled like something, and for something to have no scent at all is just  _ wrong _ .

Large-One is on edge, but when is he not? Goddess had picked him up in the great big underground den she had spent a long time in, and Dogmeat thinks she could do worse for a mate. Large-One is big and strong and seems to keep Goddess safe and fairly happy. Sometimes, they fight with their words and eyes, but they soon reconcile, and Large-One watches her sleep, as he should. Dogmeat decides he will accept this Large-One into his little pack. 

Dogmeat will guard his Goddess and her Large-One more carefully in this detestable den, because these humans are obviously not what they seem.

 

**********

 

Rivet City is the smelliest, moldiest, most unwelcoming heap of slag that Lucky has ever seen. No one will give her directions without bitching about it, and the stench is incredible.

It smells like an epidemic of cholera  just waiting to happen. 

She already hates being dirty, and the irrational urge to scrub her hands with her homemade concoction of surgical disinfectant is almost crippling. Megaton is a bastion of cleanliness compared with this floating bucket of filth.

"Fuck, it's disgusting in here. Smells like piss and disease."

Her new companion wrinkles what’s left of his nose in agreement. "I do not like the look of this place," he says in that odd accent that's been driving her crazy. She's heard it before, but she can't seem to figure out where. 

In all fairness, Charon doesn't seem to like the look of any place. He reminds her of a gargoyle, always watching and guarding with a vague frown and a grumble that he probably thought she couldn't hear. Whether it’s a frown at the whole world or caused by her mere presence, she isn't sure.

He might hate her, and she doesn't blame him, but she'll be damned if she'll let him go to someone like Ahzrukhal again. And as much as she hates to admit it, Lucky doesn't want to be the  _ Lone _ Wanderer anymore.

"Ghouls don't catch diseases, do they?"

"No."

"Well, if I die of the plague, promise me you'll spread my ashes somewhere pretty."

He peers at her blankly with the look that means he either doesn't get her joke, or that he thinks she has said something stupid. At least, that's how she interprets it. 

The man won't put more than two words together if he can help it. She gets a perverse kick out of pulling them from him. It's a bit like baiting an old, grumpy bear, but she finds the challenge irresistible. 

"Oh, wait. You just let the bloatflies take care of it. Efficient, I guess, but not nearly as poetic."

Again with the blank stare. But it isn't blank at all, not really. There’s something behind the eyes she has decided were once blue, something that’s always listening, dissecting, analyzing. Her giant bodyguard may be taciturn, but he is  _ not _ stupid, and she thinks that those who have made that mistake in judgement have paid for it dearly. 

"It's romantic, in a way. 'From ashes to ashes and dust to dust.' Becoming what we came from, finally free to float wherever the breeze takes you."

Lucky is beginning to think he gives her that look just to irritate her.

"Eh, Dogmeat knows what I'm talking about, don't you Baby-dog?"

Dogmeat thumps his tail and pricks his ears forward. Dogmeat always understands her.

"Let's go find Vera before I come down with whatever virus is incubating in here this week," she says, sweeping past and sliding down the banister of a ridiculously small staircase like she saw in a tape about sailors on a gunship.

It doesn't go as well as it had for the sailors. Her boot gets caught and she tumbles end over end and into a wall. She weakly raises a hand with a thumbs up and grins at the sound in between a snort and a laugh she hears at the top of the stairs. 

 

**********

 

They don't get more than halfway across the ship before Lucky feels a hand on her arm. 

She swings around, ready to damage the hand that touched her without asking, but finds that it belongs to a woman who looks about ready to cry. 

“Don’t hurt me!” she whimpers, flinching away. 

Lucky takes a step back, hands up. “I won’t. Are you ok?”

The woman's dark eyes dart fast with fear. “Yeah. No. Not really. If I tell you something, you won't tell anyone? Maybe you’d help me?”

“Why me? You don't know me at all.”

The woman looks like she wants to bolt, but is able to hang on to some bravery. “I hear things. From people, or on the radio. They say you're the Lone Wanderer. From the Vault. Your suit, it says so. They say you're a good person. You fixed Megaton. And Arefu. Helped Carlos, and that boy in Greyditch. So maybe, you might help me.”

What is it with the Wasteland and beating people down so far they can't get back up again?

“I’ll help you if I can.”

She straightens, getting a little taller, but still looks as if she wished she could disappear.

“Okay. So, I’m Mei. I used to be a slave. But I ran away. And now, there's a slaver in Rivet City. They’re after me. But I won't go back!” she almost yells, eyes wild with a mix of fear and anger. “I’d rather die!”

“Shh! Not so loud!” Lucky pulls her into an empty room and Charon automatically makes a wall of himself, his gigantic frame filling the doorway.

Her only route of escape blocked by a giant ghoul, Mei looks as nervous as a rat in a trap.

“Hey, don't worry,” Lucky says with her nurse voice, “Charon is a friend. How can I help?”

“The slaver who’s after me. It's Sister.”

“So where is she?”

“Not her,” Charon says over his shoulder, “him.”

Lucky whips her head up to look at him. “You know him?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

He shakes his head. “It is not safe here.”

“Fine. Mei, what do you need? You want him knocked off?”

“No! I couldn't ask you to do that! I don't know, I just don't want to be afraid anymore. Maybe, you could lend me caps to buy a gun? I’ll pay you back, I swear!”

Lucky looks at the woman skeptically. She's small - not that Lucky isn’t herself - but there's a toothlessness about her, a kicked puppy look that doesn’t bode well for survival on her own.

“Have you even shot a gun before?”

“Well, nooo, but I've seen other people do it.”

“That doesn’t count. You'd end up shooting yourself instead. Maybe we can find somebody to teach you. I'm only going to be here a day or so, and you need a hell of a lot more time than that.”

Mei looks at Lucky like she might be a mixture of rabid dog and guardian angel.

“You’d do that for me?!”

“Well, yeah. So let’s go shopping! Hey, who sells guns around here, anyway?”

“Flak,” Charon pipes up.

“Gesundheit?”

“No. Flak, from Flak and Shrapnel’s gun shop. The foremost arms dealer in the Wasteland.”

“I like him already.”

“Perhaps. But you will not like Shrapnel,” Charon says sagely.

 

**********

 

“I’d like to talk to Flak, if he’s available.”

“Yeah? And I’d like a Giddy Up Buttercup. So fuck off.”

And so, with that charming introduction, Lucky meets the infamous ex-raider, Shrapnel.

This, though, this she could deal with. He’s like Jericho’s twin. She grins, all piss and vinegar. “Well, maybe your stupid ass can help me. But I doubt it.”

Shrapnel barks a laugh. “You got caps, I guess I got what you need.”

“What I need is somebody who’s not a dick wearing clothes. So I need Flak and not you.”

He grins at her some more, sizing her up and apparently likes what he sees. “Flak!” he yells into a back doorway, “Customer!”

Flak comes out from the back, wiping his gun-oiled hands on an oiler apron. “If you wouldn't be so damn rude to everyone that comes to the shop, we’d make more caps.”

“She don't like me.”

“I fucking wonder why,” Flak growls. “Welcome to Flak and Shrapnel’s,” Flak says to her in a tired voice that sounds like he's been at the end of his patience for years, “you got a problem, we got the answer. Now what can I do for you?”

“I need a little something for a friend. And maybe you can teach them how to shoot.”

“I don't give lessons. So, are you gonna buy something or not?”

As always, caps make the impossible suddenly so doable it's a wonder no one had done it before.

She opens her pack and starts pulling everything out. Assault rifles, shotguns, handguns, a perfectly repaired missile launcher (she would have to think of a better way to thank Charon), ridiculous amounts of ammunition for the energy weapons that she rarely uses because she doesn't like the burning plasma smell - she unloads them all, neatly setting each on the table according to size and classification. 

Both Flak and Shrapnel just stare at the bounty that has magically appeared on their counter. 

“Sweet baby Jesus,” says Flak.

“Fucking hell,” says Shrapnel, reaching out to pick up the launcher.

“Ah, ah, ah! No touchies!” Lucky says, slapping his hand away hard enough to sting, and Charon immediately moves closer to her side, his arms uncrossing and right hand stealing to his gun. She bumps his leg with her hip to tell him it's alright, and he looks down at her and while he relaxes a bit, he's still wary. Dogmeat growls low in his throat, the way he does when he senses a tension he doesn't understand. 

“He gonna bite me?” Shrapnel asks suspiciously. 

“Charon won't  _ bite _ you, he's a man, not a dog. But they’ll both fuck you up if you don't keep your hands to yourself.”

“Fine, sorry,” Shrapnel says, not looking sorry at all. “We gonna do business, or what?”

“I dunno. Flak gonna give lessons?”

“Yes,” Shrapnel says immediately, but Flak still doesn't look convinced.

“I don't have the time.”

“Then I don't have the time to trade with you. It's too bad. I really hadn’t wanted to lug all this back home, but-”

Shrapnel jabs Flak in the side,  _ hard. _

“Oh for fuck sakes, fine! Who am I supposed to teach?”

“Mei, honey, come here.”

Lucky had thought she could sneak pretty well, but she doesn't have shit on Mei Wong. But when you spend your whole life trying to be invisible, you probably get pretty good at it. The tiny woman appears out of nowhere, materializing between Charon and Lucky, sticking close to their sides. 

Flak starts a bit when he sees the callus on her neck from years of a slave collar, but his eyes go soft, and while he has the good grace to look ashamed, he covers it up with tempered gruffness. “So, what do you want, lady?”

Mei is silent and weaving back and forth on each foot, as if she might fly away if someone looked at her wrong. Lucky sighs and answers for her. “I’m thinking that .44 over there. And here's some parts so you can teach her to repair it.”

“That's a big gun for a little girl.”

“And if she shoots, it’ll be to kill. She’ll just sting somebody with a .32. And the slide on a 10mm can be finicky.”

“More parts and ammo for the 10mm…”

“Good grief. Both then. She'll have one to blow a real big hole in something and one for everyday.”

Mei looks like she really might take flight. “Two?” she squeaks.

“Yes, two. Then you’ll be ready for anything.”

“I don’t...I can’t...I can’t pay you that much. And I can’t pay him for lessons,” Mei whispers.

Lucky pinches the bridge of her nose. She really just wants off this filthy tub, and the haggling paired with the almost ever-present hunger is setting her up for a rager of a headache.

“Mei, it's fine. I'll pay for your lessons. Now take the damn guns before you piss me off.”

“No!” she almost yells, stamping a little foot, and Lucky thinks she could be fierce with enough practice. “I couldn't! What if I worked for you?”

“I don't have anything that needs done. Do you have work for her, Flak?”

Flak thinks, stroking at his walrus mustache.”Maybe she can help clean guns, or dust, or some shit,” he says guardedly. “Pretty girl at the counter won’t hurt. At least she's nicer to look at than Numb-Nuts,” he says, jerking a thumb at Shrapnel.

Shrapnel grins and gives Flak the finger. “Whatever, Bitch-Tits.”

Flak gathers up a nervous but steadier Mei, and begins to gently teach her about her new weapons, careful to keep a respectful distance. He treats her like fine china, and Lucky thinks she can leave her here safely.

But sadly, that leaves Shrapnel to deal with Lucky.

“Now, how much you want for that big fucker on the end?” he asks, mooning over the missile launcher like it was a beautiful woman.

“Three cases of 5.56 ammo and all the shotgun shells you have. And if you find me a real bar of soap, I'll love you forever.”

 

**********

 

Vera Weatherly is not what Lucky expected. Blonde, pretty, and still young is the opposite of how Lucky had envisioned her.

A young woman running a business by herself was probably not the type to want to be saddled with a child.

"Vera, he's a great kid, smart, well-behaved, real healthy-"

"Of course, I will."

"I would have taken him, but he’d be alone in the house. Well, there’s Wadsworth, I guess, but he doesn't strike me as a good babysitter - wait. You will?" Lucky is dumbfounded. She had expected, well, she isn't sure what she expected, but certainly not for it to be this easy. In the Wasteland,  nothing is easy. Ever.

"Lucky, it's ok,” Vera says with a smile that looks real. “Bryan’s my brother’s boy. Of course, I'll take him.”

“Huh. Well, I'll go get him, then. It might take a few days, maybe a week. He's tough, but I'm sure he can't move as fast as my friend over there,” Lucky says with a nod to Charon and a grin. “I have a hell of a time keeping up myself.”

Vera shakes her head and laughs. “No need. Harith is here for a night or two, and he owes me a favor. He can swing by Greyditch and pick him up. Bryan will be safe with the caravan, I'm sure.”

Lucky looks to Charon for confirmation that he would be safe, and for a wonder, he answers with almost more words than she had ever heard at once. 

“Yes,” he rasps. “A mercenary, perhaps two, usually with a guard dog. The merchant will likely be combat capable, as well. It will be much safer than traveling alone.”

“But will they be nice to him? He's not a piece of luggage, you know.” Lucky would rather just go get him herself if the poor kid had to go through anything else unpleasant.

Vera laughs again and Lucky wanted to rub up against the sound like a cat. “Harith’s at the Muddy Rudder if you want to meet him and be sure. You're staying in Rivet City tonight?”

“A room would be lovely, if you have one.”

Charon clears his throat, and Lucky has no idea what it's supposed to mean. Sometimes, she thinks she can read him like a book, and other times, he is a complete enigma.

“What’s up, big guy?”

He looks like he wants to say something but thinks better of it.

Vera suddenly looks nervous, and it changes her whole face.

“Ah, well, I might be full tonight, I'm afraid.” 

Lucky doesn't like the way Vera’s voice has gotten high and tight. It means she's lying. The eyes darting between her and Charon confirm it. She suddenly doesn’t like Vera much at all. 

“Fine. We’ll just grab some dinner then. What's on the menu?”

“Oh, I don't have much here. The Muddy Rudder has much more selection.”

Lucky could just about strangle her. She gets it now. It's Charon. Vera doesn't want anything to do with him, but she hasn't got the lady-balls to say it. 

But Bryan needs a safe place, and remembering his how his big eyes went hard when he said the animals would just dig his dad's body up anyway, Lucky had decided she would do just about anything to find him a home.

Again, she finds herself biting her tongue until it bled. 

“Of course it would. Good. I’m finding myself in need of a drink or five.”

 

**********

 

It’s all the caravaner’s fault.

Lucky had been fine with her Nuka-Colas. Just fine. Belle, the barkeep, is a salty bitch, but who wouldn't be having to live in a shithole like this? Charon is even relaxing with the whiskey Lucky pressed into his hands. Well, as relaxed as he ever gets. It had taken gargantuan effort to figure out what he wanted. 

“Whatever you think is best,” he had said.

“What. Do you. Want. To drink.” she had repeated, giving him a goofy grin to let him know she doesn’t think he's stupid. Just irritating.

He gave her a scathing look, but answered a quiet, “Whiskey. Neat,” as if there would be ice here and any other choice. She wondered if that was how he had ordered his drinks before the war, with certainty of exactly what he wanted. She had smiled and ordered him the best one on the menu, not that Wasteland-trash, but something unopened from before. Say what you want about Belle, but the bitch kept an admirably stocked bar.

He doesn’t throw it back in a rush like most people do, he takes little drinks, swirling it around in the glass as he silently sits next to her, looking at nothing and everything.

Lucky Harith’s caravan guard ‘Ricky’ sits next to her. He talks to her, and he’s interesting. Tells her all about the Wasteland, and all the people he meets and places he sees. They make it a game to mark spots on her Pip-Boy map of landmarks she should see.

Then he buys her a ‘Nuka-Pow’ and everything goes straight to shit.

“You’re nice,” Lucky hears herself say. Or slur, maybe. It sounds okay in her head, but after the third glass, she has the strange feeling it doesn't sound the same to everyone else. 

“I think you're nice too,” he says, and his voice is low like music in the background. 

She should slow down on these. Yes. She should. But they taste nice, sweet and burn-y. Whiskey and cola. So simple. So  _ smart _ . She’s smart. Why hadn’t she thought of it? She likes the way the sugar feels all round and thick on her tongue, the way the whiskey cuts through the bubbles and tastes warm. So she knocks another one back. 

‘Ricky’ has somehow gotten very close, and the Lucky can’t remember how he got there. He’s got his fingers on the back of her hand, tracing patterns on the skinny bones.

“Did you know all my friends are nice?” Lucky says to no one in particular. “Moira’s nice, Gobbie’s nice, Dogmeat’s nice, Charon’s nice...wait. No, he's not nice at all, but I don't mind. He thinks a lot, I think. Lots of thinking happening. All the time. Never stops. I bet he’s real smart. Thinking all the time like that. But you wouldn’t know it, cause he doesn't say much.”

Things are wobbling and pitching and rolling, and for the first time since she got here, she actually feels like she's on a boat. 

“Gettin’ seasick, Cap’n,” she says to Charon, leaning up against him because he’s solid and safe and keeps the things from eating her. 

Suddenly there's an arm around her shoulders, but it's the wrong arm from the wrong side.

“I think you should get to bed. I have a room at Vera’s,” Ricky says softly, and his breath is too hot in her ear.

“Nuh-uh,” Lucky says, and she would be happy to never hear that woman's name again. “Vera pretends to be nice, but she’s not. Not really.”

Ricky’s arm is too heavy, and she can't breathe. It’s too hot. This whole place is too fucking hot. She wants out of here, out of this awful stuffy air that smells like stagnant water and literal shit.

“Charon?” she asks.

“Yes?”

She looks up into his face, blue eyes all filmy, sky covered by fog. “Let’s go look at the moon,” she says, and thinking about a cool sliver of silver rising in the dark, she suddenly can’t stand being here anymore. Wriggling out from under Ricky’s arm, she grabs her drink in one hand and Charon’s wrist in the other, and drags him off his barstool.

“Where are you going?” Ricky asks, looking like he wants to follow. But Lucky wants to be alone. Well, as alone as she can be.

“Out. Bye.”

She turns to wave, but the ground seems to stick to her boots and she stumbles. Charon catches her around the waist and he looks back to Ricky with a smile that shows teeth.

“Why’re you smiling?”

“No reason,” he says quietly, steering them through the boat and out into the night.

Charon is confusing.

Even though the air is balmy - sticky even - the breeze from the flight deck hits her face and she instantly feels better.

“I hate it in there,” she tells him. “Bad air. Too heavy, like you're drowning in it. I’d rather swim the whole river than go back in there.”

He says nothing, but lets her lean on him until they get to the railing facing the bay. It's only a crescent moon tonight, but those are her favorite. She likes how the moon is either just coming or going, like it can't make up its mind. In the dark over the bay, you can't see how dirty the water is, only the moonlight on the waves, and for a moment, it looks like the world from the tapes, perfect and undamaged.

“Charon?”

“Yes?”

“Do you remember what the world was like? Before, I mean.”

He says nothing, and Lucky thinks he won't answer. He always answers her questions, even if it's just with one word and that look that tells her she might be stupid. He stares out into the dark, and his jaw works, like he's grinding his teeth. He does that sometimes, when she asks him a question he finds hard to answer. Sometimes though, she won't have said a thing to him, and he goes so still it’s like he's made of stone. She sometimes wonders if he’s having some sort of tiny seizure. 

“No,” he says.

“No?”

“No.”

“Oh. That's too bad. I bet it was beautiful.”

“I do not think so.”

“Why not?”

“If it was so beautiful, they would not have destroyed it.”

Lucky looks at him. He’s been around a long time. Carol remembers the world from before, and Lucky wonders why he doesn’t.  

But maybe it's better that way.

“Maybe they didn’t know what they had. It's always like that. It's only when something’s gone that you miss it.”

He says nothing, looking out over the bay, as if he can see something she can't. 

“I love the night. It's the best.”

He never tries to have conversations, but it doesn't bother her like it used to. Maybe he doesn't mind listening to her. Maybe he ignores her. But she doesn't think so.

“The day-time sky, it's too heavy, too harsh. It'll burn you alive, or crash down on top of you. The night though, it's perfect. It's clean. It fixes all the bad things that happen in the day. And sometimes, if you sit still long enough, you can almost forget that everything is ruined.”

He looks at her, sidelong, like he’s trying his best to pretend she doesn’t exist, but just can't seem to do it.

“You never saw the sky?” he asks.

She smiles, and decides she likes talking with him, when he would. “No. I had never seen a real cloud, or the stars. Only what I read in astronomy books. When I first came out of the Vault, I looked straight into the sun. It broke me a little, I think.”

  
He seems to think about that, and they both stare out to where the sky meets the water, him thinking his mysterious somethings and her thinking about how easily a person can be broken.


	13. For Good or for Ill

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration brought to you by:
> 
> Twentytwofourteen - The Album Leaf  
> Gust Of... - The Album Leaf  
> Film Burn - Yppah  
> Beacon - RY X  
> Nanou2 - Aphex Twin

His Mistress had gotten properly tipsy. Not _drunk_ exactly, but buzzed enough to talk nonsense and make regrettable decisions. And the way she hung on the caravaner’s every word, Charon had fully expected to spend the night standing guard outside a shitty hotel room.

He does not understand why this bothers him. It had happened all the time with previous employers. In fact, that was where he spent almost all his nights - standing outside a locked door. Worse were the ones that mistook him for a piece of furniture and made him stand guard inside.

But this time, it had bothered him. More than he cared to think about. He had felt a clench in his chest that he still does not understand. He decides it is just the fact that a stranger-turned-enemy could slip a knife between his employer's ribs and Charon would never be the wiser.

However, whether she sensed nefarious intentions or simply got bored with the guard, the look on his face when she abruptly dismissed him and instead grabbed Charon’s wrist was nothing short of _delicious_.

And that reaction he has absolutely _no_ idea what to do with.

So he buries it in the full-to-bursting graveyard where he keeps all those inconvenient and dangerous emotions and memories. But there are other seemingly inconsequential things that pop up unbidden. When his Mistress had encountered the city guard and the blonde woman at the hotel, there had been death in her eyes, and only tightly leashed.

Charon is very used to scorn, disgust, and xenophobia, but that she would be so totally and angrily offended _for_ him is unfathomable.

And now, strange creature that she is, she has chosen to sit outside tonight, on the flight deck, rather than spend one more minute in the ‘bad air’, as she calls it.

Charon finds she is not wrong.

After roaming free in the Wastes, the sudden crush of people, the dead air, the claustrophobic closeness - it is almost too much. Tunnels are one thing - one at least _expects_ them to be dank and uncomfortable. This place is supposedly safe, but he does not feel like it is, and babysitting a drunk makes it no safer. At least instead of an angry drunk, she is simply a giddy one who asks foolish questions that have no answer. But a bottle of water, a good breeze, and a remarkably fast metabolism have done wonders to sober her up.

“I'll take first watch,” she says, her light eyes steady on his face, and he is satisfied she is up to the task.

He lies on his back and stretches out all his limbs as far as they will go. It is glorious, to be able to stretch and not worry about walls and ceilings and too-small doorways. His still-healing shoulder pops like a far off gunshot and she instinctively ducks her head but laughs when she finds they are not being hunted.

The sigh she makes is tired. “I'm a whole new person. The old me, she died in a Super-Duper Mart. She would never have jumped at a sound like that. Wouldn't have even known what it meant.”

He says nothing, because as always, there is nothing to say. He thinks he understands about her old self dying, but why it happened in a grocery store of all places, he is not sure.

“She's better off dead,” she says matter of factly. “Wouldn't have lasted long out here. Too soft. But sometimes, I miss her.”

When he stays silent, she tells him to get some rest and looks up to the sky, hugging her bent knees.

They stay like that for a while, her studying the moon and him lying with his hands behind his head. He cannot go to sleep quite so easily. Maybe in another life he could, but centuries-old habits die hard. And her habits have has been passed on to him. But he tries to obey because she does this for him, he thinks - tries to ease him into her strange life. When around other people, his Mistress has to flip her sleeping schedule - and now his - to even interact with them, and he knows that sort of change makes her ‘cranky’.

And he no longer fears for his safety while she takes watch. She had watched over him those eighteen hours when he had been injured and pumped full of enough drugs to tame a deathclaw, after all.

So he really does try, lying so still she must think he is asleep, because she pulls out a book with a cover he has not seen before, dark blue and tattered at the corners. She turns on the greenish tinged light of her little computer and starts to read softly to the dog, so quiet the words are lost in the waves. The dog, curled up at her feet, pricks up his ears to catch each one, and Charon has a ridiculous wish that he could do the same. Her voice though, it gets stronger as she reads, and he can finally hear her.

“Look, Baby-Dog! Frost even has one for you!”

 

‘ _The great Overdog_  
_That heavenly beast_  
_With a star in one eye_ _  
Gives a leap in the east_.

  
_He dances upright_  
_All the way to the west_  
_And never once drops_ _  
On his forefeet to rest_.

  
_I'm a poor underdog,_  
_But to-night I will bark_  
_With the great Overdog_ _  
That romps through the dark_.’

 

The mutt seems to like that one, thumping its tail a few times.

“Good, huh? Well, wait’ll you hear this one. It's my favorite.”

Her voice is, for lack of a better word, beautiful. It is dark and cool like wet earth, softly beating out a cadence of snowy lanes and cold nights and impatient horses, until they come out perfectly round, and Charon wonders if he is the one who had too much to drink.

“Now pay attention, Baby-Dog. These are the four most perfect lines in the whole English language.”

 

‘ _The woods are lovely, dark and deep,_

_But I have many promises to keep_

_And miles to go before I sleep._

_And miles to go before I sleep.’_

 

But Charon does finally sleep. Looking up at the stars and listening to her low voice twisting around the breaking waves, he actually falls asleep of his own accord, and his last thought is that she is right.

The sky is definitely better at night.

 

**********

 

Charon is startled awake by the piercing screams of children, and the panic clawing at his gut is one he does not understand but reacts to instantly. He grabs his shotgun and rolls smoothly to his feet into a crouch, heart in his throat and breaths coming hard and fast.

So it is an understatement to say he is poleaxed to see two children and his Mistress running in a large circle, screaming and shrieking with laughter. The dog bounds and gambols around them, barking and furiously wagging its tail.

“You guys, no! I hit the ball, I get to run!” his Mistress says, running ahead of them just out of reach. “You’re supposed to tag me out before I get to home plate!”

“No way!” they yell back at her, hot on her heels.

His Mistress skids to a stop in front of him, and she looks concerned. “Um, you okay?”

The children huddle close behind her and stare. “He’s bigger standing up,” the boy says, shrinking behind her.

Charon realizes he is still crouched, shotgun drawn in the stance that means death comes for someone. He slowly straightens and slides his gun to his back, and as his hands dangle loose at his sides, he finds he has no idea what to do with them.

“Sorry,” his Mistress says to him quietly. “We were kind of loud.”

She turns to the children and serious as a little judge, she says, “Like I told you, this is Charon. He's a real good guy.”

‘A real good guy’ is not how Charon would describe himself, but his Mistress is entitled to her opinion and more.

The boy does not look convinced, but the girl is braver, stepping out from behind his Mistress’ leg to grab his hand and solemnly shake it. “Hi. I’m CJ. I live here, on the boat.”

“So, I'm right, right? About baseball?” his Mistress asks, bouncing on the balls of her feet, and as she smiles up at him with bright, expectant eyes and cheeks reddened from running around like a child, a memory rips through his brain.

 

_The scent of long-cut chewing tobacco and freshly shorn grass. Red thread of one-hundred-and-eight double stitches under his fingers. Strikeouts, pop flies, fastballs, and home runs, but it all doesn’t matter much. She's up there, in the stands somewhere. She said she’d wear her red hat, the one that makes her cheeks bloom like a garden. He sees it, a life preserver in an ocean of gray strangers. She waves and smiles, and her perfect face is more brilliant than the reddest hat could ever hope to be._

 

“Yes,” he grinds out.

“See? Told you! But those are the old rules, from way before. You guys can play however you want. Now go on. Your parents are probably looking for you.”

They whine at her a little, but she buys their silence with two rumpled packs of bubblegum fished from a pocket. “Scram!” she says with a stomp of her boot, and they scamper away, laughing and chasing each other.

“Alright. Busy day today,” she says to him, clapping her small hands together once. “I've got a million things to do, and if I get them all done, maybe I never have to come back here.”

He says nothing, because none of those million things have anything to do with him.

She sighs. “Well okay, chatterbox. Say, you were supposed to tell me about Sister.” She looks over both shoulders with wide eyes, and Charon thinks she may be teasing him. “Is this a good place?”

He does not smile. This is serious business. The kind that gets a person killed. “What do you wish to know?”

“Everything. What's he like? What's he do? How do you know him?  Etcetera, etcetera.”

Charon knows Sister well enough. If Ahzrukhal was a perfect piece of shit, he is only rivalled by Sister, true name unknown.

Sister is on ‘The List’.

It is not a terribly long list. Most died just by Charon outliving them. Some he could cross off when they and his employer’s interests clashed. But unfortunately, some names still remain in big, bold letters.

“He is a slaver from Paradise Falls. He acquires certain...assets.”

“I see. So how do you know him?”

Charon had hoped she would be satisfied with just the facts, but she too curious for measure.

“Ahzrukhal loaned him my services for a few years. At first, in exchange for caps and then, other things.”

“What other things?”

How to explain? The four years with Sister were quite possibly the worst Charon had ever experienced. While Sister was simply a symptom of the disease, Ahzrukhal was the cause. There is a reason Ahzrukhal was number one on Charon’s list, and the reason he does not think anyone will ever take his place.

“Ahzrukhal got his pick of incoming assets. Not to own permanently. Just to borrow until he wanted a new one.”

“I suppose that all these ‘assets’ were female. Pretty, too, I bet.”

“Yes.”

"So why'd their arrangement end?"

"Assets would come back too...damaged. Any permanent injury decreases their value. One was too damaged to fulfill their function. It was...problematic."

“Whatever happened, it wasn’t your fault.”

Not his fault.

No. He supposes it was not. His employers had commanded him to do horrible things, unspeakable things. Things that sent a man’s soul straight to hell, if there was such a place. ‘ _Protect this man and follow his orders_ ,’ Ahzrukhal had commanded with a nasty glint in his eye. And Charon was compelled to obey. Sister had used him to hunt down likely slaves, bring them back alive, and then, if they were particularly intractable, to break them.

What really makes his gut twist and bile rise in his throat is that he had been _good_ at it.

Sister had pushed the limits of what Charon and his contract were capable of. He had tried to make Charon break them in all the ways a female could be broken, but that was simply not possible. 

 

_"I apologize, but I cannot carry out that order," he had said, and physically, it was true._

_"Whatsa matter? Can't get it up?"_

_Charon had shaken his head no, holding a squirming, screaming woman by the arms._

_"Fine. You can hold her down," Sister had replied as if he were telling him to go wash the dishes._

 

Charon had not done those things of his own volition, true. He had fought those orders harder than any other, save for when someone ordered him to kill a child. But it is still his hand with blood on it. So can he really be faultless? Is that even a question that has an answer?

He thinks not.

He says nothing. She has not actually commanded him to. He will not re-live those memories if he can help it. They are dead and the blood is dry and he has hidden them in a forgotten grave, buried as deep as he could dig.

“So, how do you even become a slaver? How do you know they won't turn around and enslave you instead? How do you catch a slave, anyway? Hold them at gunpoint? Why don't more run away?”

Charon does not like this. She has a shrewd look on her face, and the gears and cogs are moving faster than he has ever seen before. He wants to remain silent. This information will get her killed, or when she sees how many caps she could make, will ruin her.

Caps ruin everyone.

“Listen. I get that you don't want to talk about it. Just tell me what you know about them."

There is no point in fighting it.

There never is.

So he tells her everything. About how almost anyone could be a slaver, if they could watch their backs long enough and get in with the right people. About Grouse and Eulogy Jones and The Box. About the bomb-laced slave collars and how slaves either live in constant fear or commit spectacular suicides. About the Mesmetron and how it pacifies even the strongest willed and makes them soft as mud and just as smart. About the thousands on thousands of caps a particularly pretty slave could fetch.

The gears and cogs grind to a halt as she hears about the Mesmetron and the caps.

“You’re telling me I can just talk to this Grouse guy and buy a gun that makes a person do whatever I want? And then sell them for tons of caps?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” she says, but she gets a razor-sharp smile, and it is then that Charon decides he has made a terrible mistake.

Again, he has misjudged her. He had thought she might be different than his previous employers, but with that small grin made of glass with diamond-hard edges, he thinks she might be exactly the same, just wrapped up in prettier packaging.

Charon decides then and there that he will wait, and when she turns into something terrible like he knows she will, like everyone always does, he will do his best destroy her.

 

**********

 

She says nothing about slavers again and seems to drop the matter completely, but Charon watches her closely for the signs.

Confusingly, she shows none.

She still treats people with the respect they give her, and those that do not give enough, she employs language that is all the more shocking coming from lips like hers. She does all manner of favors for all sorts of people and seems to benefit from almost none of it.

Such an intricate little monster she is.

And on their way to Megaton, that nebulous  perception of good or ill becomes too confusing for words.

“Your caps! Give me all your...your caps!” the blonde wastelander stutters, waving a shotgun around in a vaguely threatening manner.

Charon pulls his own, thought-fast, but his Mistress just _laughs._

 _“_ Oh, honey,” she giggles. “Ah, no. I don’t think so,” she says kindly while walking right up toe to toe, and she gently redirects the muzzle of his shotgun to the ground.

“I’m serious! I’ll shoot!” the man says, roughly pulling the muzzle out of her hand and pointing it at her chest. “Give me your caps or I'll kill you! I really will!”

Charon’s heart is in his throat as he takes in the situation.

His Mistress is stupid, and currently has a shotgun muzzle so close that she will be nothing but mist if the man shoots. Charon himself does not dare shoot, because his own shot will kill her from this angle. Oh, yes.  And when she does die either way? His contract will go straight to this scrawny blonde piece of shit.

His only chance is to tackle her assailant before he can get a shot off, but as he tenses almost imperceptibly to spring, she puts up a single finger, a request for silence, and he can only stand there as his Mistress devolves into insanity once again.

She laughs as he has never heard her laugh before, loud and long and completely honest. Laughing so hard tears come to her eyes, she almost sinks to her knees but instead pushes the shotgun away and wraps her arms around the man’s neck to hold herself up.

She _howls_ with laughter.

The man stands there, just as stunned and still as Charon, and they have no choice but to stare at each other in consternation. The mutt is panting and happily thumping its tail in the dirt hard enough to send up puffs of dust. The gales of laughter finally turn to giggles and then into ‘ _hooo’_ sounds, and she steps back, fanning her leaking eyes and hiccupping.

“Holy shit,” she sighs. “Thank you. I needed that so bad.” She looks like she might want to throw her arms around him again and he wisely puts a bit of space between them.

“I’m sorry. It was just so damn _funny_! What's your name, sweetie?”

“Mel,” the man squeaks out, looking at Charon with pleading eyes as if he, of all people, might be able to save him from this tidal wave of madness.

“Okay, Mel. So I gotta ask - what in hell’s bathroom were you thinking, threatening somebody with an unloaded gun?”

“I...I don't know?”

His Mistress pats him gently on the arm. “That makes a lot of sense, actually. Alright, Mel. I'm Lucky, this is my friend, Charon. You look like a good guy, so we’re gonna help you out, okay?”

“Okay?” Mel’s answer scales up like a question and Charon can commiserate.

“Okay! So. First rule of robbing people. Don't even bother. Most are poor as shit, and some of ‘em can be real mean. You wouldn’t try to rob Charon, would you?”

Mel looks up and up and swallows hard. “No.”

“But you might try a little girl like me, right?”

Mel does not seem to know the right answer to this loaded question. “Yes? I mean, I don't know?”

“No, Mel. No, you wouldn't. That would be a mistake.” She moves like water, smooth and fast, faster than Charon would have thought, flipping out the smaller combat knife from the small of her back, the spine tucked up tight against her forearm just as he had taught her. She has one hand on the back of his neck, while the other has the blade pressed up against Mel’s jugular, and one lazy flick of her wrist will have his throat torn open.

The spray of blood that Charon expects does not come.

“See? I'm just as mean as Charon. Never judge a book by its cover, Mel. That's rule number two.”

His Mistress grins amicably and flipping the knife in her hand, puts it away, and Mel breathes a shallow sigh of relief.

“Rule number three. Always make sure your gun is loaded before you threaten people. Very important. You do know how to load it, right?”

“Yes?”

“You didn't sound very confident just then. Charon, can I borrow a few shotgun shells, please?”

Charon wordlessly hands over a fistful with a small frown. It is cruel to be so kind to an enemy just before killing them. And while Mel does not realize it, he certainly must be an enemy. Charon had seen exactly what his Mistress thought about forgiveness in Minefield and Greyditch.

_Vengeance is mine, I will repay._

“You know, Mel, you could keep mugging people for five caps a job, and maybe you'd get lucky and get ten, but more likely you’d get killed instead. Who needs that, huh?”

“No one?”

“Exactly!” she says happily, and Mel unwisely relaxes.

As she patiently shows Mel how to load, unload, care for, and properly shoot his firearm, Charon gets more and more impatient. Why does she not just kill him and be done with it?

“I'm real sorry, Lucky. I was just so hungry,” Mel says, and he looks it, now that Charon has had an opportunity to study him. His  cheeks are hollow and his eyes are dull, not to mention the filthy wastelander rags that hang off his already scrawny frame like a frighteningly accurate rendition of a scarecrow.

It may be a kindness just to put him out of his misery, which makes his Mistress’s toying all the more distasteful.

His Mistress either does not notice Charon’s irritation or chooses to categorically ignore it, because she happily hands Mel a can of beans, a package of Insta-Mash, and a bag of the ever-present mirelurk jerky. The man takes them with wide eyes and stutters and Charon could almost spit at his stupidity.

“I think you're just about ready to be set loose upon the world! Think about a change of career, huh?”

“I will!” her quarry says fervently.

“There's a settlement to the north of Megaton that might be happy to have you. Arefu. Not much to look at, but it needs people willing to pitch in. Ask for Ian or Evan and tell them I sent you.”

“Thanks, Lucky. Nobody's ever cared before.”

“Well, I do,” she says chirpily, and Charon wonders how a demon can sound so sweet. “I’ll be around to check on you in a couple weeks. Now, go on and remember to be good.”

Mel smiles shyly at her, and after solemnly shaking her hand with promises not to let her down, he trots off into the Wasteland.

Charon wonders how far she will let him go before pulling out her new sniper rifle and putting a .308 in his back. She would not be the first employer to play games such as these, and she will certainly not be the last.

She sighs but turns to Charon and smiles. “Good kid. He’ll be okay if he doesn’t fuck it all up.”

Charon wishes she would make up her mind whether to be a monster or not.

 

**********

 

Something is wrong with his Mistress.

She is sick, Charon thinks. They had started heading north - why, he is not sure.  But she had suddenly changed direction to the west, and the pace she set had been punishingly fast - almost as fast as Charon tended to go by himself. His Mistress did not offer to take watch, did not pull out any books to read before fitfully sleeping, and when she was awake, drank water like she had not had any in days.

And most concerning, she ate next to nothing.

But she has slowed now, plodding along with a desperate sort of impatience. Charon walks behind her, and she is weaving like a drunk. She is silent, and has been for three days now. No useless chatter, not even to the dog, and the air is empty and wrong without it. Even the dog must know something is wrong, because it sticks close by her, looking up at her in confusion every few miles. Then Charon notices the stimpak she had tossed away like garbage and can only wonder at it. Usually, she treats them with almost the same reverence she treats the books. He picks the injector up, and is shocked to find it empty.

“Mistress, are you well?”

Swaying a bit, she turns and Charon cannot help the sharp intake of breath.

His Mistress looks terrible.

She is pale, much too pale under her dark skin, as if all the color underneath has been leached away and only a husk is left with her freckles on it. The splotches of red on her cheeks are unnaturally bright, and they send alarms clanging in his brain that he does not understand the meaning of.

“I don't feel so good,” she says in a small voice, and she reminds him more of a child than an adult.

Charon has no idea what to do. His employers have been shot, stabbed, burned, exploded, dismembered, decapitated, strangled, drowned, overdosed, irradiated, gooified, and one had even been smashed flat when a rogue Corvega had fallen off an overpass. He still cannot figure out exactly how that last one had happened, but none in his two centuries have simply taken ill.

“Gotta get to Megaton,” she rambles. “Outta water. Gonna be pissed if it's cholera. Fucking cholera. What a stupid disease. Killed by shit, Charon! Literally killed by ingesting shit-laced water and then dying of shitting. Have you ever heard of something so absolutely _shitty_?”

She cackles hysterically at a joke that is not funny at all, and it sounds absolutely _wrong_. Her big eyes are shining, but they are not tracking correctly, bouncing and jittery. Stumbling toward him, they go blank and glassy, and he has to catch her under the arms as she collapses into his chest.

 

**********

 

_I protect your life with my life._

The contract, while beautiful in its simplicity, is an odd thing, almost alive with nuance. It could mean a thousand different things to a thousand different people. ‘ _I protect your life with my life.’_ From what? Enemies? Disease? Hurt feelings? Inclement weather?

Just how far does the contract go?

Carrying a half-dead employer across the Wasteland is certainly not in the contract. But neither is teaching them hand to hand, or how to wield a knife, or how to swim.

And definitely not listening to them read in the dark and wishing they would never stop.

“Mmmm. You're warm, Gobbie,” she mumbles into his chest as he carries her. She goes in and out of consciousness, and the little computer at her wrist beeps angrily. As he administers another of what seems a hundred stimpaks, he wonders if humans can overdose on them.

“I am not _Gobbie_ , you stupid girl,” he growls at her.

“Fuck you, then,” she says calmly, and Charon thinks it may be better to keep her awake and talking.

“Who is Gobbie?”

“Good friend. Sad friend. Needs help.”

“Who else is a friend?” Hopefully she has a coherent answer so he knows where to dump her when they get to Megaton. Charon is not sure how he will react if he gets puked on.

“Moira Brown. She’s the best. Way best. Better than that other doctor.”

“Who is the other doctor?”

“Doc Church. Brahmin-fucking shit-ass quack. He can suck my dick.” Her eyelids flutter and her brows draw down into the thundercloud. “You know who else can suck my dick? _Morty._ ”

And the way she says ‘Morty’, like the name is poison in her mouth, apparently sends her into a tizzy, because she mutters unspeakably _savage_ things.

“ _Cunt,"_  she says in a growl, as if that expletive was reserved for only the vilest of the vile. “Pisses in the still. Fuck that guy. Poor Gobbie. Wish he'd grow a spine and just kill him. Can't though. Whole town’d kill him right back. But I get it. Gotta be me. Imma cut things off. Ears, fingers. Won’t stop there, either. I’ll _ruin_ him. But, guess that's just her talking again.”

“Who is ‘her’?”

“Girl on the mattress. She's a real bitch. Used to talk all day, but Ags chased her away with a violin. Only in my dreams now. Always in my dreams.”

Delirious dreams are one thing, but it is when she starts spouting absolute rubbish - in words so slurred it would give Patches a run for his money - that Charon becomes almost frightened.

“Can’t you see them?” she says soberly, like might be telling someone they have a month to live.

“What?”

“The angels.” She confidently points to a spot well above the horizon that is certainly devoid of angels or anything else. “They’re so beautiful. So cold. Oh, and _angry_. So angry. And it's all our fault, you know. It’s always our fault.”

Her eyes roll up into the back of her head and she starts to convulse, the only thing Charon can think to do is use another stimpak, throw her over his shoulder, and close the final miles to Megaton at a loping run.

 

**********

 

A sniper shot makes a soft puff on the dirt a few feet from Charon’s position. He dives behind a rock, his Mistress and himself making a crumpled heap.

The fall must have jarred her out of her stupor, because she struggles up out of the dirt to her hands and knees, and she is _angry,_ as angry as her hallucinated angels had been.

 _“Fuck you, Stockholm, you crossed-eyed puss-faced shitstick!”_ she shrieks. The outburst proves too taxing, and she collapses face first in the dust.

“Sorry!” the sniper yells back, voice tiny with distance.

Charon gingerly picks her up, and the dog whines, stuck to his leg like glue. The doors to Megaton open, and the sniper apologizes profusely as they pass underneath.

“Imma come up there and strangle you,” she says, but flashes a weak smile up at the anxious face that appears through a thin patch of decking.

“You find a way up here, and I'll let you. The ghoul?”

“Good friend.”

The sniper nods once and disappears.

A man in an unlikely hat tries to stop them, but Charon has the name of someone who is ‘way best’.

“Moira Brown,” Charon grates, towering over the duster-coated man.

Moira Brown, the one who had saved his Mistress’s leg and cured her radiation poisoning, a doctor on par with Barrows. Charon had - embarrassingly, now that he thinks about it - used his Mistress’s more lucid moments to find out more about her, and she had talked like she might never talk again. Charon had found things both alarming and strangely comforting. But now his Mistress has gone limp in his arms, and she does not wake up even when he jostles her.

“Now,” Charon clarifies, taking a menacing step forward.

“You'll want Doc Church-”

“Brahmin-fucking shit-ass quack,” Charon says calmly, repeating verbatim his Mistress’s opinion of the good doctor.

The badly-hatted man stares blankly at him.

“Very well. I will find Moira Brown myself.”

Charon tends to spend his life in silence, but he can be deafening when he needs to.

 _“MOIRA BROWN!”_ he bellows in his best drill sergeant voice, the one that comes deep from the diaphragm. Ghoulification has altered his vocal cords to make volume slightly more difficult, but the acoustics are more than satisfactory in this metal-walled, bowl-shaped city. People freeze in their tracks, heads swiveling to stare at him.

“Now wait just a minute! I’m the law in this town-”

“I do not answer to you, human. **_MOIRA_** **_BROWN!!_** _”_

A red-headed woman bursts out of a metal door and clatters down a walkway. She sees his Mistress dangling limply in his arms and her eyes go wide as saucers.

“Oh no. No, no, no. She _promised_ -”

Charon holds his Mistress out awkwardly. “Fix her.”

The woman seems to gather her wits and her whole face changes into something shrewd and capable. “Upstairs, quick,” and Charon obeys while the woman follows in lockstep, examining her new patient while on the move. She fires off questions machine-gun style and Charon answers as best he can.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Sick.”

“How long?”

“I am not sure.”

“ _How long?!_ ”

“She stopped acting herself three days ago.”

“How so?”

“Thirsty. Quiet. Pale. Then hallucinations. She did not _eat_.”

“Nausea? Vomiting? Diarrhea?”

“No. I mean, I do not know. She did not complain.”

Moira gives him a look that could have peeled paint. “Of course she didn't complain, you stupid _man_ ,” she says, as if his maleness had caused this whole debacle. “You should have taken better care of her.”

Charon bristles at being blamed for a perceived failure and tightens his grip on his Mistress, but they have entered what appears to be a shop.

The merc guarding the door raises an eyebrow but does not move.

“Rome, get the red bag from behind the counter,” Moira says. He apparently does not move with enough urgency, and she snaps at him. “Now!” The merc’s eyes go wide, but he does as he is told, and quickly.

Moira makes up a bed and Charon puts his Mistress in it, as gently as he can. It is not something he has practice with. He prefers to throw enemies through walls or snap their necks or break their elbows, so he cannot be sure he is doing it correctly.

The doctor/shopkeeper gives him a veiled yet searching look and sets to work, and it is beautiful to watch. The gears and cogs turn furiously, just like his Mistress’s, and Charon realizes these two are of the same spirit. She shines a bright light in his Mistress’s eyes, pinches the skin on the back of her hand, checks the pulse at her neck, and almost growls in anger.

“She's _severely_ dehydrated. When was the last time she urinated?”

Charon's own gears and cogs, what few he has, have ground to a halt.

“What?”

Moira looks at him as if he is the stupidest creature in the face of the earth. “ _Urinated._ Peed. Took a leak. Come on, think.”

His Mistress was strangely secretive about such things. She would simply sneak off for a few minutes and return with cleaner hands than she had started with.

“I do not know. A few days.”

“Shit,” Moira says eloquently, and the word sounds unused and untried coming from her mouth.

A memory flashes behind Charon’s eyes, and it is not one of the bad ones, but something his Mistress had said.

“She said that Rivet City had ‘bad air’. That it smelled like disease.”

“So you _can_ pay attention. Well, this is...not good. I have a book about diseases, but most Wastelanders don't get them any more. But Lucky, she's from a Vault.”

Suddenly, it all clicks in his brain with a sharp snap. The constant washing of hands and hair and skin, the boiling of already purified water, the water-soaked bandana and leather gloves, the way she cooked any food that was not prepackaged, the sigh of relief he had mistaken for a sigh of happiness at being able to make more soap.

His Mistress is terrified of disease, and rightfully so. She had been raised in a capsule underground, breathing filtered air and eating sterilized food, drinking cleaner water than any Wastelander could hope to dream of.

“Did she eat anything there? Drink the water?” she asks, consulting a thick and dusty book she had pulled off a shelf.

“She did not drink the water, but she did eat at the Muddy Rudder.”

“That place is disgusting,” Rome pipes up from the corner, balancing a few boxes of medical supplies in his arms. “I won't even eat there.”

“Thank you, Rome,” Moira says with such a look of gratitude that the merc's eyes squint in confusion, but he shrugs and walks back to his post muttering about ‘women’.

Moira is muttering just as fast. “Dehydration, pale, weak, convulsions, hallucinations. No vomiting or diarrhea, we _think,”_ she says, shooting Charon a withering stare, “holy cow, she's burning up...”

Charon stands there uselessly, watching his Mistress fight an enemy he cannot even see.

“ _MENINGITIS!!”_ Moira shouts, and both Charon and the merc start at the sudden outburst.

“Or typhoid. Either way, this bad. Bad, bad, bad. We have to get her cooled down or the fever will cook her brain. It’s literally cooking. Like a steak. Or a soup. It’ll _be_ soup if we can’t get it cooler. No, plain water is too warm, need something cold. Something really cold, something ice cold-” She snaps her fingers, and calls out orders so confidently, Charon needs no contract to follow her commands.

“Rome, bring the kit. You there, pick her up, we’re going to her house.”

As they clatter down the same way they came up, citizens of Megaton line the railings and follow them to the sizable shack that is apparently his Mistress’s home. They murmur condolences and offers of assistance, and it is then that Charon gets a true idea of the kind of person his Mistress might be.

The door is locked, but Moira uses nimble fingers to fish out a spare key from a crack under the decking. “Definitely counts as an emergency,” she mutters.

A Mr. Handy meets them at the door, buzz saw and flamethrower at the ready.

“Halt, you ruffians! You will not enter Madame’s abode unchallenged!”

“Activate executive order number 436 dash 7B, subroutine ‘DOGHOUSE’,” Moira says, and while the robot does not advance, its weapons are still readied.

“Pass phrase?"

“ _Well and truly fucked_ ,” Moira says with a tinge of embarrassment.

“Executive order, subroutine, and credentials accepted,” it says mechanically, giving a subservient dip as it lowers its weapons. “Good evening, Miss Brown and various associates! How may I assist you?”

“Purified water, and keep it coming.”

“Right away, Miss Brown,” the robot says, zooming to a corner to rattle like a cocktail shaker.

“Put her upstairs, in the bathtub,” Moira says, and Charon has his first opportunity to truly look at the home of his Mistress.

And it is _shocking_.

The way to the stairs is blocked by a ridiculously large, red, heart-shaped bed.

“Jesus,” Rome breathes, and Charon agrees. “The fuck is that?”

And while Charon thought the bed was simply tacky, the lamp on the ceiling takes his breath away. It is a lascivious tangle of limbs and Charon can practically smell the sex radiating from its halogen lighting.

“Move!” Moira snaps at him.

Charon does, and Moira gets to work in a flurry of activity, hooking up a bag of fluid, collecting rags and dousing them in water, and strangest of all, putting them along with every bottle of booze, beer, Nuka-Cola, dirty water, and any other fluid-filled container she could get her hands on, into the humming Nuka-Cola machine.

Charon stands next to his Mistress as she sweats and shivers in the bathtub, and can do nothing. So he does what he does best. He stations himself in a corner and shuts down - that wakeful dozing he has perfected over the centuries.

 

**********

 

Moira has turned the bathtub into a giant ice pack. His Mistress is marinating in cold bottles, with water soaked rags on her forehead and neck.

“Okay!” Moira says cheerfully, but the kind of cheer that bravely covers worry.

Charon quirks an eyebrow. The cure to his Mistress’s illness cannot be simply turning her into a well-chilled bottle of beer.

“Well, not _okay,_ but, it's a start. We watch her temperature, pull her out when it comes down, and dunk her back in when it gets too high. I mean, I'd try antibiotics, but anything you find will be expired by about two hundred years…”

Charon shrugs his assent. He remembers the impressive scar in Minefield, and decides this woman is fit to care for his Mistress.

“Can you help me? I can't lift her in and out by myself.”

“Yes,” Charon says, looking down at the small body floating serenely in the bathtub, and promptly panics when her state of undress actually clicks in his brain.

“Her armor. Where is it,” he growls, and it comes out as a demand rather than a question.

“Well, who knows what nasties it had on it,and it was in pretty bad shape, anyway. Hard to find replacement parts. One of a kind. Put it together myself-”

Charon takes her by the shoulders and shakes until her teeth rattle. “Where is it!?”

“Rome went out to burn it!” she squeaks.

Charon’s heart feels like it is trying to escape his chest and his stomach turns. He sprints down the stairs, out the door, and into the town. Rome is standing next to a burning barrel and Charon bears down on him like a freight train.

“Hey, man! Same team!” Rome yelps, dodging out of the way. The clothes are nowhere to be found and Charon starts panting with a stress he has only felt with the one employer that had been gooified. He feels himself go a little mad, kicking over the burning barrel and frantically stamping out little fires with the soles of his boots.

“I took everything out of the pockets!” Rome tries to explain, but Charon ignores him.

The silver buckles of a shoulder pauldron  catch his eye, and he pounces on it, not caring when the tattered skin of his fingers blister in the flame. The hidden pocket is there, singed but whole. Charon opens it and feels his bones go to jelly as the smooth paper runs along his fingertips.

Everyone sitting at the restaurant bar is staring at him like he might be rabid.

“You alright?” Rome asks, and Charon thinks he is not unkind, exactly.

“Yes.”

“If you say so. Maybe let’s clean this up and go back in?”

They do both, Charon squeezing his contract - his life - in his fist. Moira looks at him nervously, putting herself in between him and his Mistress, and he has a twinge of what could be sadness. While he is not sorry, exactly, he does feel badly about putting hands on a woman who has been nothing but helpful.

“I regret I had to shake you, Moira Brown. There was an item in the armor that is essential to her safety.” He does not mention how essential it is to his own. “Are you injured?”

“No, no I'm fine. I don't even know your name.”

“Charon.”

Moira Brown must be a creature of mercurial moods, because she takes his hand and pumps it up and down in the most enthusiastic handshake Charon has ever received. She does not even flinch as the skin of her little pale fingers touches his own ruined hand.

“So, are you Lucky’s boyfriend?” she asks artlessly, and Charon is shocked to stillness. As if such a woman as his Mistress would be interested in a beast of blood and death. And looking at her, even when she shakes and shivers and her teeth chatter like bones in a bag, the scraps of cloth covering smooth curves announce that his Mistress is definitely a woman.

“No.”

“Oh. That's too bad. I just thought, you know, the way your were hovering-”

“I do not _hover_.”

She smiles wide with all her teeth. “Oh, sure. Yah. Right. Hey, Rome?”

“Yeah, boss?” the merc says from the new bit of wall he had adopted.

“Was he hovering?”

The merc shrugs. “Like a bloatfly.”

Charon is not well versed in humor, especially not when it pertains to himself. “I am simply her bodyguard.”

Moira makes a non-committal sound in the back of her throat and busies herself taking his Mistress’s temperature. “Okay, time to come out. I'll let you tuck her in though,” she says to Charon with a wink that he wants to tsk through his teeth at.

“Come on, Rome,” she says, clattering down the stairs. “Help me find more bottles.”

Charon scoops her out of the water with ease, and he expects her to be still and limp, but she latches her arms so tightly around his neck he can scarcely breathe.

“You have to let go,” he tells her quietly.

“Nuh-uh.”

“Mistress,” he says in a tone he does not remember ever having to use, one that is firm but fair and brooks no argument.

“Okay. But will you stay?”

Always so careful to phrase her wants and commands into questions and requests, unless she thinks he is in danger, even from himself.

She truly is an intricate little monster.

“I follow you for good or for ill.”

She sighs, and it sounds heavy. Charon thinks she wanted him to say something different, but he does mean what he says. He _will_ follow her for good or for ill, until one of them dies or she tires of him, but she simply does not understand yet.

Time will teach her that the contract leaves no room for friendship.

 

**********

 

It seems time may not be on her side, because she gets worse, not better. She does not wake anymore, only mumbling about incoherent hallucinations and fingers compulsively picking at the blankets.

Charon does not sleep. In an endless dance to keep her brain from cooking with all the rapidity of a hard boiled egg, he moves her from bathtub to bed and back again. He takes a patch of wall to occupy, just like back at the Ninth Circle - arms crossed, one boot heel against the wall - ready. For what, he is not sure. Rome stops by with more supplies and wordlessly sets a chair and a plate of food next to her bed.

Charon considers ignoring both, but sees no reason to be stubborn.

People have taken to leaving gifts outside the front door, and Rome brings them in periodically. Nuka-Colas and Dandy Boy Apples are popular offerings. But there are also bottles of purified water and stimpak injectors, and someone had even dropped off a case of 5.56 ammo with an unsigned note to ‘get better and give ‘em hell.’

And to his confusion, someone had left a few bottles of irradiated water, obviously for him.

It is unfathomable.

The episodes of thrashing and convulsions increase and Moira spends most of her time in tears, but blinks them away and keeps working. She even calls in Doc Church, but he only shakes his head.

“Never seen this before,” he says. “I guess just try to keep her comfortable until she decides to hurry up and die.”

“ _Get out_.”

Charon is surprised to find he has risen from his chair to loom over the doctor with murder pulsing at his fingertips.

The doctor wisely and quickly takes his advice, and Charon mechanically sits back in his chair. His Mistress is out of the tub for the moment, wrapped up in blankets and quietly murmuring to herself. He changes the cloth that covers her forehead, squeezing more water out so it does not drip in her face.

The dog is under the bed, present at its post in true soldier fashion. It refuses to move except quick trips outside, and Rome had finally set its food and water down next to it, but it does not eat. Charon feels the dog’s chin rest on his boot, and the look the animal gives him is almost human with worry. Charon absentmindedly rubs a knuckle between its eyes, like his Mistress always did, and the dog lets him.

Eyes staring into some beyond Charon cannot see, his Mistress reaches out a hand, and he automatically takes it in his, too tired to wonder why. It is unspeakably small, and the fingers make jerky little grabbing motions in his palm, as if she is trying scale a cliff using only her fingertips.

And maybe she is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Literary considerations provided by: 
> 
> Canis Major - Robert Frost  
> Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening - Robert Frost


	14. Self-Pity is Not In Our Vocabulary

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration brought to you by:
> 
> Liquid Spear Watlz - Michael Andrews  
> For Stormboy - Rhiannon Bannenberg  
> The Sun Never Sets On the Island - At the End of Times, Nothing  
> Near Light - Olafur Arnalds  
> Airplane - The Album Leaf  
> Sub Piano - Max Richter  
> An Amalgamation Waltz 1839 - Joep Beving  
> Improv #10 One Last Thought - The Daydream Club

Dogmeat is beside himself.

He doesn't know why or how, but Goddess is dying, just like his old god had.

The pack of nasty, howling humans hadn't killed his old god. Dogmeat would never have let that happen, would have fought to the death before letting that happen. No, Old-God had died of something else, something terrible that smelled sour-sweet and rotten.

She doesn’t get up, not when he snuffles his nose in her palm, not even when he licks at her knuckles. And she tastes wrong too, like good meat laced with poison. Large-One is _scared_ , and that makes Dogmeat scared. But Dogmeat is the ‘Baby-Dog, he is the ‘Floof-Butt’, ‘The Amazing Boogie-Woogie-Wags’. He _has_ to be brave.

He noses Goddess’s hand every day, hoping she will wake up and rub the spot between his eyes or tell him he is ‘Mama’s Best Snargle-Warg’ in the voice that makes his tail go side-to-side _and_ up-and-down, but she doesn’t. So he lays under the bed to watch. He won’t leave her, could never leave her. Large-One doesn’t seem to want to leave either, and it is good to have someone to watch with. Machine-Parts seems to help, as does her mate that smells of gunpowder and spice. Gun-Spice brings Dogmeat food and water, and always lets him out when he scratches at the door, no matter the hour, so Dogmeat counts him as a friend.

Large-One does strange things in his worry. He picks Goddess up, just as gently as a overprotective mother-dog might carry one of her newborn pups, and puts her in a tub of water with odds and ends floating in it. Dogmeat doesn’t understand this, but he supposes humans do many things he doesn’t understand. Perhaps she is too dry and needs soaked? Like a thirsty plant? But then, just as gently, he takes her out again. Why does he not just leave her in to soak up more water?

It is all very confusing.

But what Dogmeat does know, is that the poisoned, sour-sweet smell is not going away, and that if Large-One is scared enough to rub the spot between his eyes himself, things are going from bad to worse.

 

**********

 

Lucky has been trekking through an odd place. It’s both hot and cold but changes from one to the other in moments. It’s the Wasteland, but somehow... _not._ There’s a silence - none of the rustlings of dried leaves on bushes, no chittering of animals, no sighing of wind, no rasp of sand blown over soil. There’s no rhythm here, no bend or sway of life, and she strains to hear anything, anything at all, but there is simply nothing.

The stars don’t even turn.

There are angels here, the ones of her dad's stories that he only told when he missed Mom. He told them a lot. But the angels weren’t like the stories other kids got told. In Dad's stories, they were beautiful and full of light, but changeable, ones who helped people one day and struck down entire cities the next. ‘God’s army’, he had called them. Capable of small kindnesses, but mostly heavenly retribution. The angels follow for a while, but they’re just as silent as this place. They judge her worth and find it severely lacking, and their anger burns cold and steady enough to freeze her bones solid. Disgusted with her and her tattered, filthy soul full of all those unforgiven sins and the other atrocities she hasn’t committed yet but surely will, they finally can’t stand her anymore. In a whisper of feathered wings they disappear, and only leave behind the frost of their discontent.

But Lucky’s not worried. They'll come back for her someday. Whether to take her to heaven or hell, she doesn't know. Maybe it doesn't matter.

Charon shows up, sometimes. Moira too.

Unfortunately, so does the girl on the mattress.

This place is on no map, but Lucky plots a course by a star, and it's one that has never failed her. North, north, always north, even if the rest of the stars are dead and refuse to turn. But the way is getting steep, and she's tired. The girl on the mattress has grabbed one of Lucky’s ankles, content for the moment to be dragged along in the dirt. She’s heavy, with her bloated rot, and pieces of her ashen skin slough off like a junk car losing its hubcaps.

Hell, if she loses enough parts, maybe she'll be lighter.

“ _You can't get away from me, stupid. I'm part of you.”_

“Nobody was talking to you, twat.”

The world turns cool and liquid, and Moira walks next to her, oblivious and silent. Lucky had tried to talk to her before, but she never answers. So she just accepts the company and keeps trudging along in that irritating _step-slide-step_ that the rotten barnacle on her ankle has forced her into.

“ _She doesn't really like you. It's just your caps she likes.”_

The world turns warm and Moira wanders away. Something big is next to her now, and she relaxes. Charon’s face looks down into hers, shuttered and unreadable, like always. And Lucky decides she likes the idea of an ‘always’ with him.

“ _You really are stupid. He's just waiting for you to die so he can finally move on to something better.”_

“Fuck you,” Lucky says, but there’s a grain of truth in what the girl on the mattress says. There’s always truth there.

And that's what makes her such a goddamn bitch.

 

**********

 

There’s a wall here now, made of stone, but the star insists that Lucky needs to climb, even though she can't see the top.

And really, who is she to tell the stars ‘no’?

The girl on the mattress has been telling her for miles that it would be stupid to scale it.

“But if you tell the truth, and I'm stupid, then that's the first thing I’m gonna do, right?”

The girl on the mattress pouts and locks her remaining arm around Lucky’s neck until she's wearing her like a cape.

“You smell terrible.”

“ _I'm a corpse. What’s your excuse?”_

Lucky shrugs. The logic is unassailable. But still, she climbs.

The stars have demanded it.

 

**********

 

Her hand is warm, and she likes the feeling, like sunshine on the dry pages of an open book. She's warm all over and whatever new land she's in, it's soft, and Lucky hopes she can stay for a while.

At least it has noises. The soft hum of a machine somewhere, wind sighing across metal, someone breathing - it’s incredible to hear sounds again, and she almost doesn't want to move for fear they'll disappear into nothingness again.

“Lucky.”

That voice, she loves it. It sounds like the safety of a nice, dark corner. But it’s so odd to hear the syllables of her name made by it, and that alone is enough to pull her up a little farther.

“Lucky, wake up,” it says, growly and gravelly and so insistent.

Her hand is still trapped by something, and her fingers move of their own accord, the tips taking in the slightly rough but not unpleasant texture of whatever holds them. She fights her way up out of the warmth and opens her eyes.

The face she has grown used to is looking down into hers, and she smiles at the milky blue eyes.

“Hey. You stayed.”

“I follow you for good or for ill,” he says automatically, but his eyes aren't blank like when he usually says it. She lets her fingers roam again, mapping the edges of suede-soft skin and the borders of springy muscle, and finds the contrast fascinating.

He doesn't snatch his hand away, but carefully moves it to his knee.

“I know,” she sighs, and wishes it could be different, that they could talk to each other like normal people. Sitting up proves impossible, but she flails until Charon lifts her up and settles her back onto the pillows she’d made by ripping apart a few useless cotton dresses and stuffing them with sleeping bag fluff.

“Charon?”

“Yes?”

“I almost died, didn’t I.”

“Yes.”

“You were in my dreams, you know.”

He says nothing, just like she knew he would.

“Are you happy? With me, I mean.”

He looks at her for a long time, eyes not blank, but intently searching inward.

“I am not unhappy.”

 

**********

 

Lucky can finally eat, drink, and get up to take a piss in a bucket on her own. But walking and stairs are too hard yet. Charon wouldn’t let her try, and is surprisingly fierce when he decided to be.

“That is not a good idea, Mistress,” he'd say, popping an eye open when she was sure he was dozing in the chair he had claimed. It's like he has his own internal Pip-Boy radar that scans for foolishness and can sense when she's about to do something stupid.

Lucky grumpily follows his advice because it's as close as he's ever come to asking her for something. And besides, it's kind of nice to have someone tell her what to do for a change.

Whatever horrifically mutated strain of typhoid-y, brain-swell-y virus she had been infected with was a real sonofabitch. She's lost weight she really couldn't afford to lose, and she knows she must look like a plate of thawed out shit.

Charon says nothing, but brings her guns and pieces of armor and any other random thing that needs a good sprucing up, and it helps pass the time. Dogmeat sits at the foot of her bed and supervises, licking the backs her hands every once and awhile - maybe just to be sure she's really alive. Moira tries to make dinner, but she's a worse cook than Lucky.

“Christ, woman! You'll burn the house down!” Rome complains when Moira scorches a pan of something. Lucky can smell it all the way upstairs. “Give me that!” he says, and she hears him chuck the whole pan in the trash. “Alright. Here's how you do it…”

The dinner that makes its way upstairs to her room is much better after that.

 

*********

 

Lucky is bored out of her skull. She has darned every sock, patched every pair of pants, repaired every gun, and upgraded every piece of armor that didn’t require an arc-welder, but she still has a set that needs a serious overhaul. She would have repaired Charon’s if she could have figured out how to work on it with him still wearing it. It seems surgically grafted to his skin, and she seriously doubts he would appreciate her trying to peel it off him.

It’s hard getting Charon out of her hair. He tended to stay close, saying it was impossible to fulfill his ‘function’ of protecting her if he couldn't see her.

“Can you at least _lurk_ downstairs? You're bored to death and I can feel it. It's driving me nuts.”

Lucky had never been accused of being a tractable patient.

Charon just grumbles at her.

“Come on!” she whines. “I have a secret way up to the roof. You could go up there with three bottles of whiskey and get totally smashed and no one would even know.”

He cocks his head at her. “Is that what you command?”

“No!” she says, more than frustrated. “I'm telling you to do whatever _you_ want! Get drunk, read a book, learn to play chess, invent a bomb out of Nuka bottles, hell, _chin-ups_!”

He stares at her for a long moment.

“I would take a book up to your roof.”

She grabs a random book, smiles to herself when she finds it's ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, and while he doesn't smile back, he takes it with gentle fingers. She smiles wider when he also takes a glass and a bottle of whiskey before he disappears.

On his way out, Charon says something quiet to Rome, too quiet to make out, but Rome doesn't seem to happy about it.

“What?! If you think-”

“I do not think,” Charon says, “I know.”

So with a few moments to herself, she gets to work on a surprise for Charon.

The Rangers armor that Reilly gave her is meant for a man, and hopelessly large. The chest piece isn’t something that would ever fit her comfortably, and even if she shaved it down, it still wouldn't be balanced. So she's adjusted the webbing, sewn in a thousand different pockets and pouches perfect for stimpaks and bottles of irradiated water, made a bandolier for emergency shotgun shells, and painted the whole set a light-eating matte black.

Even though her arms are screaming with overwork, and she's proud of her creation, she's bored again. But Charon has been gone for hours now, doing whatever mysterious things Charon does with a book and bottle of whiskey. And she’s finally run out of socks to darn, pants to let out, shirts to mend, and the crate she had secreted under her bed is finally full to bursting.

“Hey, Rome?”

“What's up, kid?” he says from down the stairs.

“I hate to bug you, but could you bring me some more books? They're in that locker by the door.”

“Don't you have a whole bunch up there?”

What is it with the men in her life being so grumbly?

“I've read these ones already,” she whines.

Lucky hears the locker open, and then silence.

“Um, is there something special you're looking for? Cuz there's kind of a lot.”

“Surprise me.”

Rome brings her a stack up to his chin, and Lucky takes some time to really look at him as he arranges them confusedly on her desk.

He's well-built - not like Charon, but really, who could be - and prickly as he is, Lucky can see Moira’s attraction. He and Charon have something in common that way. Where Charon has constructed battlements fit for a castle, Rome has tended a grove of brambles. But there’s good under the thorns they've grown and walls they've built.

“Good?” he asks, and for a moment, Lucky wonders if he’s read her mind, but he gestures toward the haphazard pile of books.

“Good,” she says with a smile. “You want to read one?”

“I don't read.”

“Oh. Sorry. I forget not everyone knows how.”

Rome bristles and Lucky can see she's hit a sore spot. “I can read!” he growls at her, and Lucky thinks someone has told him he's stupid enough times that he believes it.

“Really? That's awesome! Take this one,” she says, handing him a battered copy of Jack London’s ‘White Fang’.

He looks at her suspiciously, but closes his hand around the book and runs curious fingertips along the embossed cover showing a wolf howling at the moon. “How do you know I'll like it?”

“Call it a hunch.”

“Alright, fine.”

Rome sits in Charon’s chair, opens the book, and kicking his feet up on the desk, settles in to read. But Lucky can’t stop wondering about his conversation with Charon, and hopes Charon didn’t offend him with whatever he said.

Charon can be...intimidating.

“Hey, Rome?”

“Yeah?”

“What did Charon say to you before he left?”

Rome looks at her sideways with a little grin. “He said if anything happened to you while he was gone, he’d tear me apart.”

“Huh.”

“I’ll say.”

They read a little, but Rome still has more to talk about.

“So, you guys together or what?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Lucky swings her head up and stares at him. She figured he would be one of those ‘ghouls and humans don’t mix’ types. “It’s...complicated.”

Rome barks a laugh. “Ain't everything, though.”

“I guess.”

“He'd be alright for somebody like you.”

Lucky has no idea what he means by that, and doesn't know if she wants to ask.

“I don't think he likes me like that.”

Rome just snorts through his nose and shakes his head. They both read their books, and the silence is a good one, but it doesn't last long.

“Hey, Lucky.”

“Yeah?”

“What do you think about Moira?”

“What about her?”

“Well,” he says, intently studying his book and not reading a word of it, “She pays me better than a caravan would. Safer work, too. But…”

“But what? You bored?”

“Are you kidding?! Not with her. Something’s always exploding or starting on fire, and there was the time she put a hole in the wall with that damn junk launcher thingy she's been jacking around with…”

“So whatsamatter?”

“I think I kinda like her.”

“So what's wrong with that?”

“I dunno. She's so smart and pretty, and I'm...not.”

Lucky snorts. “Nah. I mean, I’m not gonna call you pretty, but…”

“Hey! I’m plenty pretty!” he says, batting his dark eyelashes at her, and Lucky has to admit, she’s never met anyone with lashes that long, but he just grins when she barks out a laugh.

“Yeah, yeah. You're plenty smart, too. Just in a different way. Besides, I bet if you asked her, she'd say she kinda likes you, too.”

“You think?” he asks, looking at Lucky to make sure she's not lying.

“Definitely. Bring her a book, maybe. She really likes those. Here, take this one,” she says, handing him a copy of ‘Jane Eyre’, “and if you want to get smarter, start reading.”

The silence is companionable again, if short-lived.

“Hey, Lucky.”

“Yeah?”

“What's...in-com-in-ca-ble mean?”

“Read the sentence to me.”

“It was the masterful and in-com-in-ca-ble-”

“Incommunicable.”

“Right. Incommunicable. ‘It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility and effort of life.’

“Well, say that word wasn't there. With what you've just read, what do you think the sentence means?”

Rome reads it over a few times, brows furrowed in concentration, but someone else answers for him.

“It means the universe has secrets that cannot be understood, so it only laughs as we struggle through life.”

Both Lucky and Rome’s attention snap to the doorway being filled by Charon. Lucky wonders if he's drunk, but the bottle in his hand is only half gone.

Rome whistles through his teeth. “Goddamn. Have you read this book before too?”

“No.”

“Then how'd you get all that out of...that?”

Charon shrugs his shoulders once and says nothing.

Lucky decides that his still waters run deeper than a well-digger’s ass in a drought.

 

**********

 

Lucky has been getting up and trying to walk around, and with heroic effort, she's made it to the hallway. And what greets her there has her breathless.

And not in a good way.

“ _What the fuck did you do to my house?!”_

She’s breathing heavy, both from exhaustion and a little panic and she grabs the railing like she's on a storm-tossed ship. The world is getting black around the edges, and Charon grabs the back of her arm to steady her.

Moira looks up from her perch on the abomination of a bed, red hair turned to lurid flame under the lights of whatever the actual fuck is firmly affixed to the ceiling.

“Oh. Well, um-”

“I said comfortable. I said soft. I said ‘something I could kick off my boots and relax in.’ This is not relaxing, Moira. This is...it's...”

“Tragic,” Charon says at the same time Rome pipes up, “Real nasty.”

Moira pouts, crossing her arms defensively. “Well, Jericho was in the shop, and he said-”

“ _Jericho_?!” Lucky almost screeches.

“Yeah, I told him what you wanted, and he said you'd like this one best. He seemed really happy to help.”

“Imma kill you, Jericho No-Name,” she growls, “Kill. You. Dead.”

Charon stiffens beside her, unconsciously keying up like a Pavlovian response of destruction, and Lucky quickly bumps a hip into his leg and he relaxes. “Jericho’s an ass, but I wouldn't kill him. Totally gonna figure out a way to hide a dead molerat under his floorboards, though.” She taps her chin thoughtfully. “Maybe I could dig a tunnel. Then I could put one in there every time he pisses me off…”

“That would undermine the structural integrity of the building,” Moira says despondently, still upset at her failure as an interior decorator.

“That's okay. I'll just drop it down his chimney.”

“The pipe is too small,” Moira says, looking like she wants to cry.

“Who said anything about it being in one piece?” Lucky says, waggling her eyebrows.

Moira looks up at her, as if shocked she hadn't thought of it first.

Lucky laughs and it feels _good_. She stumbles her way down the steps, Charon still holding her elbow to keep her from falling on her face. Flopping down next to Moira on the ridiculous bed, she can't help but let out a gasp and a moan she knows is absolutely salacious.

“Holy shit. If you take the bed back, can I please, please, _please_ keep the sheets?”

 

**********

 

Lucky rests and recovers, eats and drinks like food and water are going out of style. Even as she gains weight and strength, she wisely stays in the house. A relapse is a very real possibility, even though she's practically climbing the walls.

She did put on a water-soaked bandana over her mouth and nose to go check on Gobbie. Charon had insisted on coming with. He discreetly held her up while everyone in town pressed her hands and told her how happy they were to see her.

The crush of people is too much, and she wants to wash her hands so badly she could cry.  Charon notices and steers her through the crowd and into the bar, and Lucky’s so grateful, she gives serious thought to kissing him.

Her knight in busted-ass armor.

“Good to see you up,” Gobbie says quietly. Moriarty is in the back, but he's got unwholesomely sharp ears, and today, the bar is empty, and sound travels easily.

Gob nods nervously at Charon, and Charon nods back. Lucky figured they knew each other in Underworld, and the way Gob looks at him as a thing to be feared, she knows he either knows about the contract, or knows just enough to be scared.

“How’re you doing?”

Gob shrugs, and winces as his shoulder goes too high. So the beatings haven't gotten any better. In fact, he asks her to leave.

“Um, okay.”

“It's not that I don't want to see you. You're about the only person I want to see. It's just, things are getting rough around here.” He jerks his head in Nova’s direction, and usually, she never has bruises, but her right eye is sporting a shiner to put a boxer to shame. Gobbie’s got his own wounds, a swollen cheek and a busted lip. “And it gets rougher after you leave.”

“Right. Of course. Carol says hi, by the way.”

“Thanks, Lucky.” He does his best to pretend she's not there, wiping the bar like the answers to life might be under the permanent layer of grime.

She desperately wants to promise him that everything will be alright, but she can't because it won't. Neither of them are in any position to help themselves out, and Lucky can't just shoot Moriarty in the face like she's been aching to do. Then all three of them will be in deep shit - Gobbie most of all.

But Lucky’s smart. She’ll figure out a way. Because if she doesn’t, she won't be able to live with herself.

 

**********

 

Moira goes back to the shop, and Rome with her, but they stop by every night to cook dinner (Lucky’s breakfast) and relax.

Rome, for all his ‘cool kids don't read’ noisiness, has been absolutely devouring his book. Moira helps him with the words he hasn't seen before, and whenever she doesn't know one, she asks Lucky.

When Lucky sees their delight at learning a new word, she decides she’s going back to Carnegie with a pack brahmin if it kills her.

“So, the Klondike is like the Wasteland, right? But with snow? And dogs like Dogmeat pull people’s sleds to get around? And moose? What are those?” Rome asks, and Moira looks at her breathlessly because she wants to know, too.

“Yeah,” Lucky says with a soft smile. Books had let her experience exotic places that had once been real, places and times she would never see with her own two eyes, but could go back to whenever she wanted with only the flip of a few pages. “The Klondike is a real place.”

Moira stares at her in awe, but Rome looks suspicious. “Are you sure? You aren't lying?”

Lucky draws herself up and she really is a bit offended. “I might shoot people in the face that need it, but I never lie.” She fondly remembers Burke’s brains floating in the whiskey glass, and the charnel house going up in flames. “Unless I lie and _then_ shoot them in the face.”

Moira jabs Rome in the ribs with a sharp elbow. “She's not lying to _us_ , doofus,” she says, but with a smile that tells him she’s teasing. “Now hush up and listen.”

“The Klondike is a real place,” Lucky says in the voice she uses to tell stories to Dogmeat, “but I'm sure it doesn't look the same anymore. It's way way north and west of here, on the other side of the continent. Jack London, the guy that wrote your book? He travelled for years up there by dogsled in the 1800s. And yes, it was absolutely _covered_ in snow. Up there, in the summer, the snow melts and the sun never sets. Daylight all the time. But in winter, everything freezes almost solid. The sun never rises, so it's always dark, and there's a phenomenon that fills the sky with waves of light. The Aurora Borealis. I’m betting that's probably still there if you ever get a wild hair up your ass and decide to trek to the Arctic Circle.”

Lucky knows she's talking too much and that people don't like that, but she can't help it. She misses her clean textbooks with their glossy pages. She takes a quick peek at Charon and while he isn’t staring at her like she's a nut-job, the hands that are cleaning his shotgun for the five-thousandth time are still.

“What about the moose?!” Rome says impatiently.

“Moose are like giant deer with huge, flat horns, like, _feet_ across.” She spreads her palms wide and makes moose-antlers on her head. “They could kill you, trample you to death. But packs of wolves - like bigger, meaner, wild dogs, can take one down.”

“So it was just as dangerous then as it is now,” Moira astutely comments.

“Yeah. Back then, we hadn't tamed the wilderness yet. It was all new. And then we got too fucking smart for our own good. So here we all are, back to trying not to get eaten by every damn thing.”

“It must be hard for you up here, knowing what it used to be like,” Moira says softly.

Lucky sort of feels like an ass. These people, good people, had grown up in this world, had lived it and breathed it, and had _thrived_ in it, and the best Lucky can do is feel sorry for herself.

“Nah. The Vault was safe, sure. But it was no way to live. They told you what to be, when to marry, how many kids to have. They wanted...a lot. Too much.”

Moira stiffens where she sits, but Lucky flaps a hand at her. Who would want to bring kids into a world like this, anyway?

“It's fine. Really. Up here, you can do whatever you want, be whoever you want. There's no one to tell you ‘no’. Kinda neat, really. Fucking dangerous, but neat.”

 

**********

 

Lucky is huffing and puffing hard enough to blow all the fucking houses in Megaton down, but it's _heavenly_ to be doing something again. Charon is out again, thank God, up on the roof or some other high-up place he always seems to climb to when she shoos him away. Dogmeat is out galavanting too, doing one of those long roams that male dogs seem to need every once and awhile. Lucky doesn’t mind. She knows Stockholm will let him in when he comes scratching at the gate.

So what if she’s dizzy? It's not that bad. It's not like she's fallen down yet. Well, there was that one time, but the wall was right there. At least she hadn’t hit her face or anything. And isn’t sweating a good thing? Means you're doing good work, right? Lucky is _redecorating_ , and in a mood like this, the devil himself couldn’t stop her.

But if the devil couldn’t get in her way, then God have mercy on the next poor bastard who purchased that lamp sight unseen.

“I dunno. It's kind of... _titillating..._ don't you think?” Moira had said, excited to use a new word she had learned.

Lucky had snorted. “Mostly tits with a whole side of ass. Why? You gonna keep it?”

Moira made a ‘maybe’ sign with a flip-flop of her palm, but Rome had looked appalled.

“You bring that thing back into the shop, and I quit.”

Moira finally scrapped it for parts because no one in their right mind would buy it off her.

Not even Wolfgang.

At least the lamp is finally gone - thank you baby Jesus - but sadly, so is the bed, and its sin-soft sheets along with it. But maybe it's for the best. She thinks with all that satin rustling against her bare skin, she'd waste some sleeping time...well, not-sleeping, if you catch her drift.

Replacing that awful, yet intriguing bed, is a dark brown couch that after a vicious scrubbing, turned out to actually be a light fawn brown. It's not bad, a little lumpy, but it doesn’t have any springs sticking out or blood on it anymore, so that makes it fucking cherry. A beat-up coffee table and two chairs complete her little living room set, and it's nice, really nice. Like her own honest-to-goodness home. And now, she guesses, Charon’s home, too.

But all that done - with help, even - and Wadsworth is _still_ picking at her.

“Oh, _please_ , Madame!” Wadsworth says for the fiftieth time, his little pinchers clicking in a simulated anxiety that both cracks her up and makes her sad because it's not real. But maybe with enough tweaking and tinkering, he could achieve sentience, become a ‘real boy’ just like Pinocchio. Sans nose, though.

And for a guy without a nose, he sure can stick it where it’s not wanted. He's been after her for hours now. ‘Please sit and rest, Madame!’ ‘Please, Madame, you were _deathly_ ill!” “Please, Madame, my sensors indicate that your heart rate is much too fast!”

“I said, I’m fine!” she says with some heat.

“But, Madame! Your constitution is so delicate!”

“I'll show you how delicate my constitution is when I scrap your eye-stalks and make myself a pair of binoculars. Now scram!”

If he would have had lungs, his gasp of absolute indignation would have taken half the air from the room.

“Very well, _Madame_ ,” he says huffily, zooming downstairs and out the front door to pout in the twelve foot radius she had programmed him to be able to float in when he had expressed an interest in ‘airing his circuits’.

“Awesome. Now I've offended a robot,” she complains to no one in particular. “How much lower can one sink?”

She can hear him outside the door, making testy little _clank_ noises and then his thruster zooms off again, probably to work off some simulated crabbiness. “Damn it,” she says, “Now I feel bad. It's like kicking a puppy. A puppy made of metal.”

The door opens, and is not gently shut.

“There she is! Please, sir! You simply _must_ do something! I’ve told her time and again-”

Lucky freezes like a deer in headlights, the large - and fucking heavy because she had Moira weld an extra foot onto it for a gigantic Charon - piece of bedframe still in her hands where she had tried to drag it up the stairs.

“Mistress,” Charon growls warningly at her.

Well, shit-beans. She's in big trouble now. This was all supposed to be done before he got back. Like a surprise. And if it hadn’t been for Sir Bucket of Bolts hounding her, it would have been.

She really didn’t think her limey, tea-time, ‘Madame, did you hear the joke about the electrons’, robot-butler had it in him.

"Did you seriously _t_ _attle_ on me?!”

Wadsworth, if he had a face, would have looked both sheepish and defiant.

“You would not listen to reason, Madame!”

“Snitches get stitches, you know.”

“I lack the required skin-”

“ _Not talking to you, Wadsworth!”_

Wadsworth floats away to his docking station and shuts down, apparently just too done to deal with anything for a while. Maybe he’ll reset and forget about it.

That, however, leaves her with Charon, and if she thought Wadsworth was irritated, he hasn’t got anything on her giant bodyguard. His jaw is set and his eyes are narrowed with his arms crossed, and he looks like he might want to spank her like an ill-behaved child.

And _that_ thought has her thinking other thoughts she probably shouldn’t.

“I do not understand why you push yourself like this.”

“Cuz I’ve got stuff to do. Lots of stuff.”

He doesn't look impressed.

“And that would be...?”

“Well, I'm building a bed, for starters. Then I'm going to go up to the roof and build a water still. You know, it catches water from the air and cleans it with the heat of the sun-”

“I am aware of how a still works.”

“Oh good! You can help me build it! I mean, only if you want-”

“Why do you need a second bed?”

“For you to sleep in, goofus. See? I had Moira make it longer so your feet don't-”

“I do not require sleep.”

Lucky feels her eyes go wide like she knows they do when she gets good and pissed or scared. Her 'storm', Amata had called it. It's like they’re trying to take in more light so she can fight better. An evolutionary response or something, and goddamn if she hasn’t got a head _full_ of mad right now.

“I don't give two shits against a fan-blade if you ‘do not require sleep’.” She says that last bit with snarky air-quotes, and knows she sounds like a brat, but _fuckall_ , he can be irritating when he puts his mind to it. “You’re goddamn well going to have a place to do it anyway.”

He looks at her, a little stunned and very still.

“Very well,” he says, plucking the bed frame out of her hands like it doesn’t weigh three hundred pounds and carries it upstairs. She wiffles and waffles for a minute, not sure if he's mad and wants to be alone, but finally follows because she wants to help.

He’s sitting on the floor with his long legs stretched out all over everywhere, and holy cow, they look nice.

_Jesus, lady, stop ogling the contractually obligated bodyguard and get a grip._

Her toolbox is already opened in his lap and he’s rifling through it, picking out this and that, until he has what he thinks he might need. Her little soldering-gun, the one she had bought off Moira that uses flamer fuel, is in one hand and he looks like he knows how to use it.

“Do you need any help?” she asks, but she kind of already knows the answer.

“No.”

“Oh.”

“It would be wise if you rested.”

“Okay.”

He looks at her suspiciously, as if he's trying to figure out why she's docile all of a sudden.

“I didn’t mean to yell at you. I'm sorry.”

He just grunts at her and starts welding the footboard and a long cross-brace together, and apparently, the conversation is over.

 _Note to self,_ she thinks. _Grumpy bodyguard has hard time with gifts._

 

**********

 

Lucky whistles tunelessly under her breath, excited but a little scared to be on the road again. But after the scene at Moriarty’s, she needed to get to Paradise Falls, and figured a job that is hopefully without too much combat is the perfect way to get back in the saddle. Plus she has a few people to check in on.

She looks at the stars and thinks about Mel.

Poor kid. He’s lucky he had tried to rob her and not some other Wasteland asshole. But there’s a good heart under all the scruffy dirt, and Lucky hopes Arefu might help him grow up. Funny how she could think of somebody ten years her senior as a kid that still needed to grow up, but there it is.

Age really is just a number.

Charon ranges ahead, and Lucky lets him. Ever since their tiff, he had been a little quiet, but not angry or irritated, just _pensive_ she supposes. Thinking a lot. But after she told him they were headed to Paradise Falls, Charon hasn't said a word to her, and the answers he does give are so short and terse they may as well not be answers at all.

Lucky doesn't understand it. They had shared meals and moments. Watching over each other while the other slept, protecting each other from danger, patching each other up. He had held her hand and took care of her when she was sick, had carried her across the Wasteland like she weighed as much as a bit of fluff. He had even smiled at her a few times, and had laughed, of all things.

Lucky wonders how she managed to piss him off without even trying.

She wonders if he regrets her buying his contract. The second he told her he could never be free, she had just about lost her lunch. He is a slave, and as much as he had stressed it was his contract she owned and not him, those are just words, and ones that contradict each other so badly they might as well be gibberish. Selling the contract is out of the question, but maybe keeping it is no good either.

What a shitshow she had managed to waltz herself into.

She studies him furtively as he marches ahead, his back ramrod straight and steps hard and angry. Sometimes he doesn't realize how long his legs are, and has to stop and wait for her to catch up. Ever since Gobbie, ghouls don't disgust her like they do other people. If anything, Lucky finds them absolutely fascinating. Who cares if they’re missing a little skin? And her nasty, scarred-up leg is just another reminder that her own skin isn't exactly pristine anymore either.

Truth be told, Charon is a gorgeous creature. Not in the way normal people might think, though. If she ever took him back to the Vault, they'd all die of fright. But to Lucky, he's gorgeous in a completely unapproachable way, like you might admire the sight of snow on a craggy mountain, or stand in awe at a lightning storm - you'd love to love it, and have it love you back, but it was more likely to kill you instead.

Charon is what she always imagined a man should be like. Intelligent, competent, powerful, but in enough possession of his own maleness that he doesn’t need to announce it to the world. And when she had shucked him out of his armor to extract the metal in his shoulder, she had been stunned to see just exactly how well-put-together a man could be.

Lucky doesn't know too much about men. She had dated Freddie Gomez for a few months to test things out. Twenty years old was coming up fast, marriage age, and she needed to choose. He was good-looking and had always been kind to her, so it was okay. They had been together-together a few times, and it hadn't been too bad. Hurt like a bitch at first, but that was normal, and he had said he was sorry. Not sorry enough to stop, but still sorry. But a few months of meeting in vacant maintenance closets and a whole lot of fumbling in the dark hadn't really taught her what a man liked.

And for a moment, she wonders what Charon likes.

 

**********

 

“Charon?”

“Yes?”

They are sitting in an abandoned house on a hill, holing up there for the night. Day. Whatever. Lucky has cooked dinner (breakfast?) and to be perfectly honest, it’s pretty terrible. She’s never been a good cook, and they’re out of meat to grill. She moves it around the metal plate with her tiny spork, but it doesn’t improve the taste.

She wants to ask him why he hates her so much. It rolls off him like the heat from an explosion - both invisible and more than palpable. But Lucky’s a coward, and she knows it. Approval is something she craves from people she cares for, and she’s only a little surprised she has come to care about Charon, even if he only hates her back.

So she chatters and tells him she’s sorry about the shitty food.

“I never really learned to cook. Mom died before she could teach me, and Dad was just as bad, if not worse. Some mess we are. Were, I guess.”

Charon says nothing, of course. Some silences are good, the kind where it's okay to be quiet because it doesn't hang heavy, it's sort of just there and full enough that you don't have to fill it up with anything else.

This silence is thin and brittle, and somehow it's all her fault.

“Charon?”

“Yes?”

“I know you said you're not unhappy. But is there someone else you'd rather be with?”

He says nothing for a long time, and she feels her cheeks flush with embarrassment. What a stupid question. It should have been the very first one she asked. But in addition to being a coward, she’s selfish, and she knows that, too. Lucky turns her back on him, busily cleaning up the remnants of her attempt at cooking. But as she walks to the door to toss out the trash, he shifts in his chair and sets his shotgun to the side.

“I have no preferences.”

She snorts a laugh through her nose, and she's starting to get angry, but at who or what, she can’t really tell. “You do too. You prefer steak, shotguns, and old whiskey. You prefer going in first because you’re afraid I’ll fuck it all up. And you _prefer_ to irritate the living shit out of me by letting me talk to myself like I’m fucking cracker-jacks.”

He says nothing, but looks at her as if to say ‘yes, you are cracker-jacks’.

“If I died tomorrow, who would you want to take your contract?”

“I have no pref-”

“If you say you have no preference, I’ll...well, I don't know, but I’ll be real mad.”

He stays silent, and she blows a stray curl out of her eyes with an irritated huff.

“Listen, I’m not trying to be an asshole, okay? We both know I'm gonna kick the bucket someday. Probably soon. I don't live the safest life, you know.”

Charon lets out a long breath, takes another one, and lets that out too. “I have no preference, Mistress, but I also know of no one suitable.”

She sits back, stunned. Surely there was someone he trusted, someone he knew, maybe from ages ago, that would be up to the task of owning a man and not fucking it up.

Lord knows she isn’t doing a bang-up job.

“Well, shit. Sorry. Think about it, okay?”

Charon nods in the affirmative, and apparently, that will have to be good enough.

“I’ll take first watch,” she says, hoping to make amends.

He lays down, and lately, he’s actually been sleeping, and it seems to be good for him. He looks brighter somehow, eyes less cloudy and pinched, and if she didn't know any better, she'd say he was gaining muscle mass.

She thumbs through her travel library, fingers fluttering softly along the spines and letting them decide what to read. Carnegie had done her heart good, like a balm for a wound she didn't even know she had. The blue cover of the poetry anthology feels especially nice on her fingertips and she smiles.

Lucky has always loved poetry. The metered words were something best read aloud so you could really sink your teeth into its meaning. She knows Dogmeat likes it. He always perks up his ears and listens, anyway. So she reads softly, little more than a whisper, and smiles at the poem she had landed on.

 

 _Out of the night that covers me,_ __  
_Black as the pit from pole to pole,_ __  
_I thank whatever gods may be_ __  
_For my unconquerable soul._ __  
__  
_In the fell clutch of circumstance_ __  
_I have not winced nor cried aloud._ __  
_Under the bludgeonings of chance_ __  
_My head is bloody, but unbowed._ __  
__  
_Beyond this place of wrath and tears_ __  
_Looms but the horror of the shade,_ __  
_And yet the menace of the years_ __  
_Finds and shall find me unafraid._ __  
__  
_It matters not how strait the gate,_ __  
_How charged with punishments the scroll,_ __  
_I am the master of my fate,_  
     I am the captain of my soul.

 

The last line rings out louder than it should have, and she worries she has woken Charon.

“What is that book?” he asks up to the ceiling, not looking at her.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

He sighs irritably. “You did not wake me. What is the book called?”

“That poem is called ‘Invictus’ by William Henley. It's really old. Like, 1800’s old.”

Charon says nothing and stares at the ceiling, hands behind his head.

“Does it bother you? I can be quiet.”

“No,” he says quickly and Lucky can't stop her eyebrows from climbing into her hairline. He usually takes forever to answer her. So she smiles to herself and dives into the book, making the words real and tangible, something to catch in your fingers and hold up to the light and turn this way and that until all their little secrets are illuminated.

And two hours later, she’s still reading. Frost, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Dickinson - even a sneaky little blush-inducing thing by Rumi that, had she known where it was headed, probably wouldn’t have read it out loud.

But Charon doesn't seem to mind.

He's still awake, staring at the same spot on the ceiling like he hasn't moved a muscle.

“You should get some sleep,” she says softly, and is three kinds of surprised when his eyes flutter closed and he does just that.

 

**********

 

“This is going to be great!” Lucky says, skipping and sashaying around as they walk down a ruined road. She does some pirouettes and leaps out of it when she feels dizzy, like she'd seen the ballerinas do in the tapes.

Charon grumbles behind her.

“Thank you,” she turns around to tell him, but he's so close behind, he almost plows into her, “for telling me about the Mesmetr-”

Looking up into his face, she sees a look of anger so dark it freezes her guts solid.

“Whoa. Um, are you okay?”

“No.”

“What’s wrong?”

Charon grinds his teeth and Lucky can hear them creak. “If you continue down this path, you will become like Ahzrukhal,” and the look he gives her is heavy with meaning.

It all clicks in her head - past conversations with the words turned around to be seen from his perspective - and it hits her like a suckerpunch.

“Oh.”

“I spoke out of turn. You are your own to command. I am yours to command also.”

“Did you really think I wanted to become a slaver?”

He looks at her with an expression so profoundly confused, it clouds his intelligent features like a fog.

“Oh, wow. You did.”

Lucky wants to sit down in the middle of the road and cry. Could the world really be this terrible? How can anyone even stand living in such a depressing place? Do people really go bad that quickly here?

So instead of bawling like a castrated calf, she tells him about Gobbie and Moriarty and Nova and the beatings and the drugs and her plan that, even if it doesn't fix it all, should at least help.

His eyes light up like a Christmas tree, and Lucky decides then and there to do whatever she can to see that look again.

“Mistress, I would tell you something... important.”

“Of course,” she says quickly.

“The contract. It was almost destroyed when Rome burned your armor.”

Her heart almost stops when she realizes what she has on. Leather recon armor, a bit like Charon’s, but cut for a woman, more brown than black, and _not_ her Vault suit with its hidden pocket and its contract.

“Oh Jesus. Oh fuck. Are you going to kill me?” Lucky rambles, adrenaline soaking the back of her mouth as she fingers the stock of her assault rifle. She doesn't have a prayer. His shotgun will tear her in two at this range, and she knows just how fast he can draw it. She has seen what happens when the contract changes hands. It's like a talisman keeping the Grim Reaper at bay, and the moment you take it off, he comes to collect with a vengeance.

Charon winces as if he'd just gotten punched in the mouth.

“No. You were in no condition to hold it. It belongs to no one but you until it changes hands with another.”

“But I thought you couldn't hold your own contract?”

Charon looks at her with a face full of _something_. He's thinking, and hard enough that if his mind had propellers, he'd have flown away by now.

“No. I simply held it in trust for you. But I would feel more...comfortable...if you would take it back now.”

It's in the palm of his hand, still folded up tiny - half a finger long and about as wide - and it’s much too small to hold a man’s life. She looks at him, searching for any sign that he even wants her to take it back.

“Why didn’t you give it back sooner?”

“I do not know,” he says softly, but refuses to look at her, and it's suddenly so clear. He wasn’t sure he wanted to give it back to her at all.

“You could give it to anybody, really. Moira’s nice. Carol would treat you well. All the steak you could eat, I bet.”

“As an employer, you are...acceptable.”

He still holds out the contract, and she takes it between her fingers, the cloth-paper blend so much like the pre-war money she had naively tried to use.

“Ok. I'll take it. But the minute you find somebody better, tell me. I’ll take you wherever you want.” She hates it, to phrase it in a command this way, but it's for his own good.

“As you wish. Try to keep it on your person, please. If someone had taken it…” Charon lets the words hang in the air, and Lucky bends her mind to the problem the whole way to Paradise Falls.

 

**********

 

Lucky feels rather undressed.

Constrictedly naked, more like.

She’s going to talk to Grouse today, and thought she should look the part. But as the leather pants try their best to become a second epidermis and the tiny jacket pushes her boobs up to her chin, Lucky is feeling just a smidgen self conscious.

“Don't even say it,” she growls in a voice that says if she had sharp enough teeth, she might tear into something with them.

Of course, Charon says nothing.

“Ugh. I feel like a fucking tramp.” She's tempted to unbutton something - anything - if it means she could breathe normally, but knows it would mean a major spill. “You know those raider girls? I always felt a little bad for shooting them. Same team, you know? “

Charon apparently does not know.

“Well,” she says, doing a desperate little shimmy in the hopes of freeing up some lung space, “now I know I was just putting them out of their misery. No one should have to go through life dressed like this.”

Charon's lips quirk a little on one side, his version of a smile, but the kind you fight against.

“Do I look okay?” she asks him.

His eyes flicker from head to toe and then back up again.

“Yes.”

That little word could mean a thousand different little things. ‘Yes, you are dressed appropriately to fool a pack of slavers.’ ‘Yes, but you are still ridiculous.’ ‘Yes, but not when you fidget like you have an itch.’

Or, ‘yes, you look good enough to eat.’

She shakes that last thought out of her head, because it doesn't belong there. “You'll have to stay behind, Dogmeat. Everybody and their mom knows you by now. Charon, I'm sorry, but you should too.”

“I follow you for good or for ill. I protect your life with my life,” he growls at her, and he has the same look he had when he carried her out of Our Lady Hope under his arm.

She rolls her eyes but smiles. Charon gives the word ‘stubborn’ new meaning.

“Fine. But I might have to say some things to you that are pretty shitty. Whatever I say, just remember that I don't mean any of it, okay?”

“I understand, Mistress.”

“Are you sure? You could stay back on that bluff over there, cover me with the sniper rifle. You know how to shoot it, right?”

He gives her a ghost of a smile, a sharp one. “I am capable. But I would follow you.”

 

**********

 

Lucky had thought she would just walk right in, but there's a caravan ahead of her.

And not just any caravan.

A whole train of slaves are coming in ten deep, bound collar to collar, just like Charon had told her. Covered in dust and shambling, they look like they haven't had any food or water in days.

One falls, making the others ahead and behind her stumble, and the driver cuts her from the group and beats her mercilessly. The woman lies terribly still down in the the dirt, the only movements she makes are the leftover inertia from the kicks to her midsection. The driver shrugs his shoulders and pulls out a heavy baseball bat. He stares down at her for a moment, rolls her onto her back with a poke of his boot, and methodically begins to beat her face in. Frothy blood and skull splinters spatter everywhere and all over everything.

He doesn't stop until her head is bowl-shaped.

“Goddamn it, Forty!” a woman dressed in red armor yells. “We don't get caps for dead ones!”

“She was dead two miles back. Just didn't know it yet. Besides, she had a face like a mole rat.”

Lucky stumbles back into Charon’s chest, unconsciously seeking any stray bit of humanity she could get her hands on. He's solid against her, catching her by the waist to make sure she doesn’t fall.

He gives a soft squeeze - maybe to tell her he's there for her, or maybe it's as simple as trying to keep her from fucking up.

But either way, when his fingers leave her bare skin, she misses it like empty lungs miss air, and it's then and there she realizes that she's got it _bad._

 

**********

 

Grouse sits at a desk-turned-guardpost like a sleazy lawyer, and as soon as he opens his mouth, Lucky knows she has him.

“Hey, cutie! What can ol’ Grouse help you with today?” He leans forward, almost licking his chops.

She mirrors him, still standing, but leaning over the desk, hips cocked to one side and pleading with her tits to not fall out of her shirt.

“Looking for work. And from what I hear, you've got plenty.”

“What's with the zombie?”

Lucky glances over her shoulder, praying Charon doesn't snap. He stands a subservient distance behind her, looking at a patch of ground three feet in front of him. But Lucky sees the long stare that means he sees everything. He remains carved out of stone, but the little muscle leaping at his jaw says he would burn this place to the ground if given enough fuel.

“That trainwreck?” she scoffs, and it's so _hard_ to do right. She likes Charon. A lot. He's become a friend, someone she would trust with her life. He doesn't seem to feel the same way, but in this cesspool of a world, she'll take what she can get.  “Ugly, isn't it? But it gets the job done.”

‘It’. Like he's an animal that had just enough smarts and training not to piss indoors.

“You let it have a gun? Isn't that a little dangerous?”

“It’s, ah, _very_ well-trained. Best caps I ever spent. Makes me sick to look at, but we all have to make sacrifices.”

“Does it talk?”

“Dunno. Never asked. Hey!” she yells at Charon, and he simply looks at her feet. “Do you talk?!”

He says nothing.

“Guess not.”

“I’ll give you 400 caps for it.”

400 caps. The price of a pristine missile launcher. Two assault rifles. Four sets of combat armor. Eight bottlecap mines.

And somehow, the price of a man.

Lucky pretends to consider the offer, but really only weighs the merit of cutting out either Grouse’s tongue or eyes before she kills him.

Both options have undeniable attraction.

“Tempting, but no. It sends out a certain message, you know? A real ‘don’t fuck with me’ vibe.”

“Well, if you change your mind, you know where I am.”

They get down to brass tacks, and she tows an imaginary line between flirtatious and greedy.

“Here's the gun,” Grouse hands her a gun so ridiculous looking, she almost can't believe he's serious, “and here's the ammo. Don't fuck around with it, cuz it's hard to come by.”

“Alright.”

“And these,” Grouse says grinning, “these are the collars. They’re packed with explosives that really keeps ‘em in line. They try to run too far, _KA-BLEWY!”_ He makes pretend bombs go off with both sets of fingers.

“Thanks,” she says brightly, buoyed by the thought of the sounds he might make when she broke each digit.

“When you bring in those five, come on back,” he says, tracing a knuckle down the back of her hand, “I'll buy you a drink, see where it goes.”

“Mmhmm. I'll come back just as quick as I can. And trust me, you'll be the first one I’ll go see.”

She walks away, swaying her hips, thinking about fierce Mei and a feral Arkansas, and how the steel of their collars had dug in so hard for so long it had become a part of them.

Something crystallizes, so diamond-hard and clear in its truth and purpose, it almost takes her breath away.

She isn’t sure how yet, but Lucky is going to wipe this town off the face of the earth so ruthlessly, God himself would be stunned.

 

**********

 

Lucky wants to be home so badly she can taste it. She feels dirty and sick and so indescribably tired. Charon doesn't treat her any differently after Paradise Falls, but she still feels like a piece of shit.

“Charon, I'm so sorry,” she says for what has to be the thousandth time, but each time she says it, it still doesn't help.

“I am not offended.”

“You know I didn't mean any of it, right?”

“Yes,” he says with some exasperation.

“Are you sure? That whole thing was pretty awful.”

He stares at her for a long moment. “I have heard much worse from those who meant what they said,” he says quietly.

She winces at his tone. It's matter of fact, and that he could be so nonchalant about it all is heartbreaking. His collar isn’t made of steel, it's made of wires in his brain and words on centuries-old paper.

“I'm so sorry,” she says softly, and she means every bit of it - every moment of every day of two hundred years, years and moments she can’t possibly fix or even truly understand.

“It does not matter.”

And Lucky remembers a line from a poem, not one that rhymes, because it's so brutally short and starkly beautiful it doesn't need to.

 

“ _I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself…”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Literary considerations provided by:
> 
> White Fang - Jack London  
> Invictus - William Ernest Henley


	15. Our Lives Are Short Compared to Stars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration brought to you by:
> 
> Echoes of You - Oneke  
> Opus 17 - Dustin O'Halloran  
> Primavera - Ludovico Einaudi  
> Short Change Hero - The Heavy  
> China - BRONCHO  
> Dawn - RY X  
> Zoetrope - Joep Beving  
> The Theory - Clem Leek  
> Twice - Little Dragon

Charon gets to sleep in a bed.

That, while certainly not common, is not completely unheard of, either. A few employers had let him sleep in one for a couple hours sometimes, but the occasion had been rare.

What is positively confounding is that this particular bed is not just available to sleep in, it is literally _his_ to sleep in. No one else sleeps in it. Just him.

And it had not even been extra and just lying around, conveniently sitting there unused. No, this one had been dreamt up, designed, and built expressly for him. Well, Charon had _built_ it, but knows that his Mistress would have killed herself over it and if not for the robot, probably would have succeeded.

He cannot understand how she could be so flippant about her own health. She had said it herself.

‘ _I almost died, didn’t I.’_

Yes, she had, and as soon as she had not actually died, she had dove into work.

Charon had done his best to keep her quiet and still - posted guard in her room so she might stay there, brought work to her bed so she was at least in it instead of out of it. But finally, there was no containing her. She went mad with work.

Laundry, to be exact.

He had growled at her that she should sit and rest, but she had plopped down on a chair and just grinned up at him.

‘I _am_ sitting,’ she had argued like a little lawyer, but a lawyer elbow-deep in a bucket of Abraxo, homemade soap, and water as hot as she could stand, scrubbing every piece of fabric as if important secrets might lie beneath whatever dirt they had accumulated.

The front door had been thrown open to ‘get the sick out’, but it was no match for the steam curling out if the bucket, and her hair had reacted violently to the humidity - almost as if it had heard stories about the laws of gravity and decided they were only suggestions to be ignored.

The curls were _everywhere._ Charon was, and still is, both confused and dismayed at the itch in his palms that demanded he wind at least one around his fingers.

And then she had done something he cannot account for. After dragging a piece of steel bedframe larger than herself up a flight of stairs like an idiot and summarily growling at Charon as if _he_ were the one being stubborn, she had waltzed back in not even an hour later, armed with a large bundle of fabric.

“Here go,” she had said, dumping it on the newly constructed bed and then fleeing to her room as if afraid to irritate him any further. She had brought him...bed-things. A pillow. An army issue olive drab blanket. What could be described as a sheet - five different colors of fabric cobbled together so as to look like a distorted map of the world - but still a sheet.

And they were familiar, familiar in the way that in his mind’s eye, he could see little fingers compulsively picking at the blanket fibers, corkscrew curls spilling onto the blue pillow, a patchwork sheet twisting around a small body racked with fever.

They were familiar because she had taken them from her own bed.

They smelled like her. Not like when she had been sick, but a clean smell, like she had scoured them mercilessly and then slept in them a few times - and the sleep had been good. He had stood there and stared at the pile for what must have been a solid five minutes, but had finally made the bed as if he had spent a lifetime making beds - spread this bit out, tuck this corner under - with a strange feeling that it was only complete when a bottlecap was able to bounce off it. 

He had already made the bed three times today. Maybe just because he could. Charon cannot really be sure why. But what he is sure of is that the whole damn thing  _still_ smells like her.

He folds back the blanket that is spread over a bed that will actually accommodate his height, and as he slides under it, the scent floats up through his excuse for a nose, and right into his brain. Even days later, it clings. It is not a scent he can describe, and if the neurons that are firing like so many small explosions have a name for it, they refuse to tell.

But now it is time to sleep. His Mistress is already in her own bed, sprawled out more like a  liquid rather than a solid, but Charon has a feeling that sleep is not going to come as easily for him.

He is right, and he wonders why.

Lying on his back, he stares at the ceiling, but it holds no answers.

It never does.

 

**********

 

His Mistress is a creature who throws herself into dangers because she ‘promised’, helps orphaned boys bury their fathers, feels sorry for ferals, gives water to beggars, and spares misguided men that Charon would have shot without a backwards glance.

Who they are trekking across the Wasteland at this very moment to go visit. To make sure they are ‘settling in’, thank you very much.

His Mistress is an enigma that surpasses all understanding, and Charon thinks that his mental health would be better if he just does not try.

 

**********

 

Mel drags his Mistress all over the tiny hovel that passes for a settlement, proudly showing her the new turrets and the bunker shored up with car parts.

Arefu is on an overpass of all things, and while it is a defensible position, it is also a dangerous one. Just a few raiders holding the chokepoint of the entrance, and they could be marooned on an island of their own making.

“This place is not safe,” Charon says matter of factly.

“I know!” Mel grins, getting even more excited. “I was looking over the edge one day, thinking that I'd never been any place so tall, and what if I got stuck up here and never got down! So, I made a ladder!”

His Mistress stares at him as if he has gone mad. “A ladder. Off an overpass.”

“Well, I mean, yeah! Not really a _ladder-_ ladder, but it's a box. With a metal cable and a pulley...oh! And a weight! Did you know a person weighs about as much as a car door? And if you put two people in at a time-”

“Holy fuck, you're smart,” his Mistress says, eyes round. “I knew you were good stuff the minute you tried to rob me with an unloaded gun.”

Charon looks at his Mistress with one eyebrow cocked up.

“Hey! There's all different kinds of smart.”

“Tell _them_ that,” Mel says, disgruntled. “They all said I was crazy. ‘But, Mel, why? We don’t need to be able to get off an island in the sky! The _Family_ protects us!’ But Ian stuck up for me. He says, ‘Yeah, right. Til a pack of raiders kills all six of them and starves us out.’ _Then_ they all liked my upper-downer.”

His Mistress pats him kindly on the arm and he smiles at her as if she might be some kind of goddess incarnate.

“Never change, Mel. Never change.”

 

**********

 

“So...I'm gonna go do a stupid thing.”

Charon swings his head up and wonders what could possibly be more stupid than all the other stupidly unselfish things she has already done for people who did not deserve them.

“I'm going to find a violin.”

She had rambled about ‘Ags’ and her violin in her fever dreams, how it had ‘torn out the bad pieces’.

“But it's in a Vault. And nobody seems to know its location. So, I'm going to Vault-Tec headquarters to find it.”

“Why?” he asks before he can stop himself.

“Because I promised.”

Again with her ridiculous promises. She makes them to anyone and everyone, and while so far, she has kept each one he has seen her make and some he has not, he does not understand her need to make them in the first place. She has choices. She can do whatever she wants, go wherever she wishes, whenever she desires, and yet she instead chooses to wander the Wastes, scattering one-sided promises as she goes.

What is the point of it all?

“You don't have to go, if you don’t want to,” she says, looking at the ground.

As if he could have choices like her. But here she is, giving him choices anyway.

“I follow you for good or for ill.”

“Yeah. I know,” she sighs. “I guess after all that shit at Paradise Falls, I just need to do something...something _good_. You know?”

Charon does not know. He does what his employer commands, right or wrong, good or evil, but has no compulsions to do either on his own. He simply obeys.

But that is not true. Charon tries to use no more force than necessary when commanded to hurt an innocent, to make their deaths quick and clean when commanded to kill them. He had tried to be as kind as he could in those four horrible years with Sister. And those four years had weighed heavy on him, heavier than all the rest combined, he thinks.

And what about the loopholes he exploits so gleefully, the way he seeks them out - is that not choice, some small measure of free will?

Who but her has given him more opportunities to use what little choice he has?

So as they trek to Vault-Tec Headquarters, he tries to grumble a little less. While she looks worlds better than when she had tried to kill herself constructing the bed, she is still slightly weak. But then again, that is how most Wastelanders feel all of the time, always wanting for a bit more of everything.

The tunnels are old memories, and the ferals are put down just as mercifully as the first time they had travelled. He and his Mistress work well together - elegantly, if allowed the term - and Charon is more comfortable in combat than he can ever remember being with another. Perhaps it is the way she uses her own formidable talents instead of hiding behind him.

A team.

He thinks with chagrin to the time she had yelled at him and gotten so angry that he would throw himself in front of her like a living shield.

His Mistress may need someone to give her ‘boosts’ up to too-tall library windows or fetch her out from under dead super mutants, but she wants no shield.

And as they ascend to the surface and she neatly takes the head off a feral at two hundred yards, it is abundantly clear that she does not need one.

 

**********

 

Vault-Tec headquarters is a nightmare. No super mutants, ferals, or raiders. Oh no.

Just robots.

His Mistress seems pleased.

“It's not so bad,” she chirps, shooting off the eyestalk of a Mr. Gutsy in a shower of sparks and then ravaging its metal corpse for wires and circuits and bits and gobbins that can surely have no use in the real world.

And she is correct. It is not so bad. They are both more than capable, and together make a formidable force. The dog she has wisely left to guard the entrance. Its teeth, while sharp, stand no chance against steel.

But robots give Charon ‘the willies’, as his Mistress says. The protectrons are just pitiful. So slow and stupid they get stuck in corners and on stairs - like some poor, misshapen, inbred animal that desperately needs to be put out of its misery. But those Robo-Brains make his skin crawl. Why a brain? Why? Are robots not inherently wrong enough that they need some poor human’s brain stuck in them? And apparently a woman’s brain? A polite, sweet, regretful, murderous woman? Just what kind of people were those pre-war monsters?

Charon wonders what kind of person he might of been before being turned into a monster himself.

If the other robots are ‘not so bad’, the sentry robot prowling the top floor is very bad. He has pulled the mental dossier on this hulking pile of metal and death, and the outcome for them is not favorable. Charon pulls his Mistress back by the belt, and this time she does not resist, looking up into his face with shining, questioning eyes.

“Sentry bot,” he whispers into her ear, not daring to speak any louder lest it hear them and come crashing through the wall. “Gatling laser. Missile launcher. We should turn back.”

She grins a sharp-toothed, happy little grin. “I've been waiting for this,” she breathes, and if he did not know any better, he thinks she has the same endorphins racing around her brain as he has, demanding chaos and destruction.

From her pack, she pulls two fistfuls of grenades and hands him half. But these are strange, silver and small with softly blinking green lights, and it takes him a moment to ransack the library for their name and function.

Pulse grenades.

And still she pulls more out. Pulse mines, regular grenades, a bottlecap mine, and it is then Charon realizes that his Mistress is also a beast of blood and death, but one with a drive and purpose he lacks. She will demolish a building and all its hostile inhabitants to fulfill a promise. And she has _fun_ while she does it.

She waves her hands like an orchestra conductor, and he sees her planning an assault in her head. It is fascinating to watch. And if he follows her movements carefully, he can see the plan is a good one. Set the pulse mines first, keep the pulse grenades for back up, save the bottlecap mine for last, and harass it with hand grenades and draw it into the traps. Only a stupid human or even a smart mutant would fall for such a ruse, but a machine, most definitely.

They creep down a floor and she outlines her plan, and Charon had guessed right.

“So, in conclusion, we work smarter, not harder,” she says grinning.

“This is still dangerous,” he says, because it is, “but I follow you for good or for ill.”

This only makes her angry and the grin disappears, thundercloud replacing it in an instant.

“Stay here,” she growls, turning on her heel.

Charon can only stand there stupidly as the fight begins without him, his tiny Mistress matched against a mobile military death machine, and wonders what he had said that he should not have.

There are high-pitched shrieks from both woman and machine, crackling explosions and _rat-tat-tat’_ s from her assault rifle, whistles of arm-mounted missile launchers and strings of curses, but not once has she called his name like she had at Our Lady Hope.

And then there is an explosion to end all explosions, one that shakes the floor and the ceiling, and sends a wave of heat and confoundingly, _radiation_ rushing over him

And then silence.

She has commanded him to stay, and while he has no other choice, he strains to go see what has become of her, or at least his contract.

“Charon?” she asks, her voice tinny and muffled.

It is enough that she has asked for him, and he lopes up the stairs to her.

The room is destroyed. A wall has caved in, pieces of ceiling have collapsed, and the room buzzes with radiation, but his Mistress is nowhere to be seen.

“Uh, under here,” says her little voice from under a patch of twisted metal. “Kinda...stuck.”

And good god, is she ever. He pulls off hunks of exploded robot, sheets of ceiling, and patches of wall. She is in mostly one piece underneath all the rubble, but the angle of her left wrist announces that, if not broken, it is at least dislocated.

“Mistress, we should leave. The radiation-”

Her Geiger counter clicks merrily, and she smiles a dreamy smile. “Nice, isn’t it?”

And for him, it is - a buzzy little high better than chems because it heals instead of poisons - but before he can argue that it is not as nice for her, she viciously wrenches her own hand counter-clockwise with a muffled snap and a curse.

“Goddamn-donkey-balls!”

 _Tick-tick-tick_ goes her Geiger counter and Charon moves to scoop her up off the floor and throw her over his shoulder because she is too stupid to care for her own beautifully smooth skin.

“Just a minute.” Her portable computer makes a soft ding, and to his astonishment, she moves her injured wrist experimentally, first this way and then that, without a trace of pain on her face.

“Well, isn’t that just some kinda fuckery. Remember how I told you about my mutation? How my limbs heal up? Totally works.”

The radiation has dispersed now, and her Geiger counter has fallen silent, but nothing, not even the explosion of the sentry bot itself, can account for this level of destruction.

“What did you do?” he asks.

She smiles that same dreamy smile. “Threw a mini nuke at it,” she says, and promptly vomits on the toes of his boots.

 

**********

 

After dosing herself with Rad-Away, she finds what she came for, downloading it all onto her computer.

Charon just tries to scrape most of the vomit off his boots and cannot help but wonder at her anger. She does not speak of it, but it lies just under the surface, and she ignores him completely.

But he is angry too, now that he has time to slow down and think. It _was_ dangerous and she had almost gotten herself killed, and for what? For a promise? For a violin that may not even exist? Had he not told her how irritating it was not to be allowed to fulfill his function? How insulting to be treated like a defective weapon?

Why does she refuse to see exactly what he is?

But while his anger grows, hers seems to have been spent in battle. As she trudges out of the building, collects the dog, and keeps going without a backwards glance, he has to ask.

“Why will you not use me properly?”

She stops still, slowly turning to face him, and she is not angry anymore, but sad.

“I don’t want to _use_ you at all.”

“Then why did you purchase my contract?”

She sighs. “Honestly? I don't know. But I knew I couldn’t just leave you there.”

“Would you have killed Greta for my contract?”

She shakes her head vehemently. “No! Don’t you get it?! I never wanted your damn _contract_ in the first place! If I knew it wouldn’t kill us both, I'd have burned it by now!”

While she is angry again, Charon can tell she is not angry at him. She is angry that her plan had failed so spectacularly. Angry that not even her formidable gears and cogs can find a solution for this problem. Angry that she unwittingly ended up owning a man in everything but name.

She laughs, but it has those broken-glass edges, sharp and fragile. “Maybe I was just tired of being alone. But now I've got some poor bastard that has to follow me whether he wants to or not. And if that's not alone, I don't know what is.”

Charon has nothing to say to this, except that he does, in fact, follow her for good or for ill, but that is what made her so angry to begin with. He has followed much worse employers, but can remember none better.

“Would you be happier in Megaton?” she asks quietly. “You could stay at the house…”

As if wasting away in her living room is preferable to making war with someone like her, someone who gives so many opportunities to draw deserving blood and make the endorphins flow. And Charon finds he _does_ want to travel with her, to kill the things that want killing, to be her weapon pointed in the right direction.

“I would be your weapon, if you allow it.”

This seems to appease her only a little, because she gives him a sadder smile and a shrug of her shoulders that says ‘I don’t care anymore’.

“I've got lots of weapons. What I really need is a friend.”

 

**********

 

_A friend._

_A friend._

Those two words follow him through the Wasteland, one word for each of his boots that strike the ground.

_A friend._

_A friend._

She had not bragged about the contract. In fact, as far as he could tell, she had not told a soul about it. While she tested his patience on a daily basis, not once had she tested his honor or integrity. She had not trotted out his mindless loyalty, or set him on anyone like a dog. And the one time she had boasted to another about his unwavering allegiance, it had been a ruse and she had spent hours apologizing afterward.

In fact, had she not introduced him to everyone as her friend? Not her bodyguard, not her thug, not her muscle, but ‘friend’, as if he himself might be someone of value.

But the only value Charon has is what is written in his contract and on his brain. A weapon and shield made flesh.

His Mistress wants no shield, and she certainly needs no weapon.

She does not really need him at all, not as he is, anyway. She needs him to be better.

To be more.

_A friend._

_A friend._

 

_**********_

 

Charon had thought they would simply go to the Vault, retrieve this wretched violin, get paid for it, and go back to Megaton.

But his Mistress, it appears, is easily distracted.

She sees mutants at the Chevy Chase Metro, their only route back west. The mutants shoot at her. She takes personal offense and screams threats laced with  obscenities the likes of which Charon doubts they have ever heard. It makes ‘I will eat your arms’ sound like a tender murmur between lovers.

He wonders if the radiation poisoning at Vault Tec has fried her brain.

And then they are fighting, his Mistress switching from assault rifle to shotgun in her rage. Charon had not even realized she could operate one, let alone blow heads off with it. But just when he thinks the fight is over, they reach the other side of the building and stumble into absolute _carnage._

Mutants and Brotherhood soldiers are tearing each other apart, and Charon could almost groan because if her past actions hold any glimpses of the future, it is that she will run to the defense of anything that shows up as a green dot on her ridiculous computer. She takes one look at the field and orders the dog to stay. It whines but obeys, and Charon knows the feeling. They kill the mutants - him, his Mistress, and this pack of overconfident tin-cans. He cannot see their faces, and it sets him on edge. But as things only can, it gets worse. A behemoth, something Charon has only seen two other times in his long life, charges through an explosive barricade of cars and buses. Charon has only one combat recommendation that fits this situation.

Run.

He yells at her, giving her a command of his own, and he knows she hears him, but of course, she ignores him.

Instead, she sprints to pick up a weapon he is almost positive she has never used before. The Fat Man she hauls to her shoulder is almost as tall as she is, but she gamely sets a foot back like he had taught her, fiddles with her computer, and fires.

The blast knocks her off her feet and onto her ass. He is _awash_ in radiation and it sings through his cells as he runs to her, but she has already picked herself up, dashed across the battlefield with all the speed and agility of a frightened deer, and reacquired her target.

Which is swinging an uprooted fire hydrant like a fly-swatter.

A thousand things seem to happen at once. Brotherhood soldiers are yelling through their helmet filters and the air is thick with wayward bullets and smoke. The errant beam of a laser rifle singes his side, but what makes him snarl is the panicked jackass throwing grenades far too close to his Mistress. Charon cannot get to her fast enough, he knows that. So he unloads his shotgun into the monstrosity’s leg to get its attention.

_I protect your life with my life._

His plan fails.

The behemoth has fixed on her, the greatest bringer of its pain, and takes a swipe that solidly connects. His Mistress is thrown through the air like a rag doll, sailing over an embankment of sandbags and into the side of a building.

Charon’s whole world is tinged red and he is firing, reloading and firing in movements worn smooth as glass through hundreds of years.

“ **_GET BACK!_ ** _”_

Someone is screaming at him, and his muscles obey this voice immediately, but some muscles are still free to send slugs as he scrambles backwards.

His Mistress is standing there, gigantic gun at her shoulder, blood pouring from wounds he cannot see, and surrounded by death and chaos and the shimmering heat of destruction like some ancient goddess of entropy, she is nothing less than perfection.

She fires and the mutant falls in a cloud of heat and radiation, but so does she.

And then Charon is next to her, gut seizing at her blank, staring eyes and he is almost sure his Mistress is dead. He drops to his knees and hunches over her, pressing his fingers at her neck like Moira had shown him to see if her heart is still beating.

“Get that zombie off her!” someone yells, and a tin can attempts to brain him with the butt of his rifle, but Charon recoils and it only catches his shoulder.

And then he loses his shit.

Charon is almost always able to hang onto said shit, able to temper his reactions and control his emotions to a point where he can become stone.

But his Mistress may be dead, may be alive, and Charon has no orders, _no orders,_ and the endorphins and radiation are running so hot and fast through his veins like a drug and the conditioning screams at him to kill and kill and kill until nothing is left breathing.

His shotgun is unfortunately holstered and he reacts with what he immediately has available, which is only his two hands. This tin-can is a new enemy, and the conditioning is _very_ clear on that subject.

All enemies must be destroyed.

So Charon does his best to rip its head off its body. His training is thorough. He knows how to operate power armor himself, and he also knows how to destroy someone else wearing it. The tin-can’s laser rifle is no better than a junk 2x4 at this range, so he rips it out of its hands and tosses it away like the piece of garbage it is. Grappling and twisting, using its own armor as convenient handles, he keeps the tin-can between himself and the others. Servos and little gears screech as he savagely yanks on the yoke of its collar, and paired all his weight thrown at the backs of its knees, the tin-can bows backwards in an almost graceful bend. And then its head is finally in his hands, the weakest point of this tin-can’s artificial defenses, but to his immense irritation, only the helmet comes off and not the whole head. A stupidly surprised human face stares up at him and blinks.

Charon growls and puts his fist in it.

The tin-can turned man makes a little squeak and falls like the sack of shit that he is.

“Holy shit!”

“Oh my god!”

“Quick! Shoot it!”

Guns are drawn, but in a moment so is his, and he wonders if it will hurt too badly when he is killed.

“Touch him and you die.”

His Mistress has dragged herself to a wall and propped herself up against it. Blood is pooling under her, but the Fat Man is back at her shoulder, ready to send anyone in a fifty yard radius straight to hell.

Everyone freezes because her voice is made of dark promises.

“You think I'm kidding?” The mini-nuke arms with a soft whine.

The tin-cans holster their weapons, put their hands up, and back away.

His Mistress is grievously injured, and only the wall is holding her up. Her ribcage looks _dented_ and when she coughs, blood comes up, trickling down the corner of her mouth to drip off her chin.

“Charon?”

“Yes?”

“Four stimpaks. Torso. Please.”

How she is even talking he does not know, but thinks it may be sheer cussedness. He does as she asks, and swiftly. The fingers of the hand not holding the gun clamp onto whatever part of him she can grab, right above his knee, and when the ribcage pops back into the right shape she lets out a soft, breathy scream. That must have been the worst, because she only whimpers quietly as the rest of her knits back together.

“Thank you,” she whisper-wheezes, her lips on what is left of his ear, and Charon thinks has never heard a sound he likes quite so much, if only because she is alive to make it. Sighing, she breathes deeper, testing the healing limit of the stimpaks, and he lets out a lungful of air when she smiles at him.

“Help me up?”

He does with an arm around her waist, her still with an iron grip on the giant gun, and finding herself an acceptable distance away from dying, she is _furious._

“Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you all.”

A tin-can tries to explain, but his Mistress never wanted an answer. Any fool should have known that just by her voice alone.

“I help you. Charon helps you. We kill your snot-monster. Then you threaten to shoot him like a fucking _animal_.”

“He looks feral!” a tin-can argues.

“You wanna see feral?” she says softly, sighting down the rail and queuing up her computer.

The situation is dangerous. The tin-cans are on edge, and if she kills them, the Brotherhood will hunt her down with more ruthless efficiency than Talon Company could ever dream of. Charon cannot tell how far his Mistress will go. He wonders if she even knows.

“Mistress. Please.”

She glances at the shotgun resting easily in his free hand and lets her own big gun slide from her shoulder.

“See? He's less feral than me.”

Her white teeth are stained red with blood as she bares them in a not-smile, and Charon agrees.

 

**********

 

Charon is having a long, but surprisingly satisfying day.

His Mistress had insisted on going into the GNR building and insulting everyone she could find in ways that Charon revels in, even if he himself is not able to do any insulting. It is more than enough to experience that sort of satisfaction vicariously, because she wields her tongue sharper than any sword.

She gets into no less than three almost-fist-fights, but sadly, Charon has to haul her back by the waist before they begin.

Her savagery, lingual and otherwise, is truly delightful.

Even the radio personality upstairs is not safe. When he withheld information about her wayward father until she did him a favor, she cut him to ribbons with her words.

Charon only wishes there would be physical violence to follow the verbal massacre, but he realizes that one cannot always get what they want.

She tells Three Dog she will fix his ‘fucking space dish’, and wishes him a lingering and particularly virulent dose of the clap on her way out.

A satisfying day indeed.

 

**********

 

“Could you imagine if I tried to do this when I first got out?” she asks incredulously as she sends three impeccably placed rounds into the back of yet another mutant’s skull.

_‘When I first got out’._

As if she had been imprisoned in her old life and had finally broken out and escaped to the life she had been meant to live. Charon agrees on both accounts. From what she had described of her woeful unpreparedness for this new world, this mission would have certainly killed her, but now, even for all her tics and idiosyncrasies, she belongs here, and Charon is glad for her cleverness, for her almost spiteful resilience. She would be dead in the dirt somewhere and he would still be stuck in that bar.

The ‘fucking space dish’ is found, mutants are gunned down, and a game is played with computer terminals and prime numbers.

Charon had thought the planetarium would hold interest for her, but it is the Virgo lander itself that throws her into transports of delight.

“The _moon_ , Charon! This has been on the fucking _moon,”_ she keeps repeating as if he had been telling her she was wrong. She runs her hands all over it, up to the places her tiny height could reach, poking and prodding and petting the metal.

Charon does not dare tell her this is just a replica and the original is still on the moon because the look of sheer, unadulterated wonder is one he would like to file away to look at later.

He gives her a boost without her having to ask, and his hands go around her calves again, right below the soft space under her knees. Just to steady her, of course. She gets the dish loose and apologises profusely to the inanimate lander for any ‘ouchies’ her screwdriver might have made.

The rest proves easy. The tin-can at the Washington Monument silently sidles out of the way, and Charon thinks someone has radioed ahead about his Mistress’s madness. She rides the elevator nervously, clinging to his arm when it jolts, and something in his chest jolts too when those little fingers curl themselves around the bare skin of his wrist.

He gives her another boost, and decides this will likely be a common event in this new, very different life he finds himself leading.

Charon also decides he does not mind.

She deftly attaches the dish with clever fingers and her trusty screwdriver, and her computer suddenly bursts into noise.

_I don’t want to set the world on fire…_

 

**********

 

Her information is gained, and he expects her to go to Rivet City to follow up on her missing father, but they head north to the Vault whose location she had bought with exploding mini-nukes and radiation poisoning.

Charon does not bother to ask why.

It is because she promised.

 

**********

 

His Mistress scours Vault 92, turning it upside down and inside out. Charon has never seen her pick something so clean. Every lock is opened, every container rifled through, every terminal hacked, and she does not rush through, but takes her time investigating _everything._

All Charon sees are mirelurks, bloat-flies, and centuries old corpses. But she is strangely melancholy in the forgotten tomb of these nameless people, but it is not the bodies with their dry-rotted pre-war clothes that make her shed tears, but a terminal that has been used as a journal.

“They played music together,” she says softly, reverent as religion. “Met in secret every chance they got. They were in _love_.”

Charon knows nothing about that, but does know that it does no good to cry over these long dead people and their equally dead music. But it is when his Mistress explains _how_ they came to be dead that his hackles rise like the dog’s.

“An experiment?” he asks, because he cannot believe it. Vaults were supposed to mean safety, a way to ensure the continuation of civilization. They were what had made his Mistress what she is, with her white teeth and her gears and cogs.

“Yeah,” she says quietly, checking her weapon and trying not to look at the two skeletons entwined in each other’s arms. “They wanted to study what effect subliminal messages planted in white noise had on the subjects _.”_

Charon looks at her quizzically, not because he does not understand what she just said, but because he does not understand _why_.

“They wanted to create super soldiers. Unquestioning. Loyal. So obedient, it takes twenty bullets to put them down. Can you imagine a platoon of soldiers like that?”

Charon can, because she had just described him.

“Anyway, it worked too well. The safe phrase stopped working. The crazy ones turned on the rest, killed them. I doubt any got away. It's not like a bunch of musicians would have made it too far anyway.”

As if young doctors from other Vaults would have been any better off.

“And if this vault is like the rest...even mine - all experiments? It's like they never wanted to save anyone.”

She is pacing now, gears and cogs flitting from thought to thought quick as a small bird between branches.

“Obedience.”

She has stopped and turned to face him.

“You and I, we’re both creatures of obedience.”

He stares back at her, and he has no words.

“You obey because you’re forced to. I obey because I was bred to.”

His Mistress tells him of her Vault, about its dictator and their innocuous title, of manipulation and the life lived that was not a life at all. Tells him of arranged marriages and quotas for offspring as if they were so many cattle.

She tells him how she had killed her first fellow human with a baseball bat, how his dead eyes had judged her, how she had been hunted like a wild animal but had escaped, only to be broken by the sun.

She laughs, bitter as cold wind over waves. “Well, I suppose I've just had an epiphany. Now I just have to decide who to obey.”

“Only yourself,” Charon hears himself say.

A smile the likes of which he thinks he has never seen in all of his two hundred-some-odd years breaks on her face, and it sends a thrill up his spine that he had put it there.

“Thank you.”

His Mistress delicately picks up the glass case, and holds it out to show him. The violin is a tawny red - the color of old whiskey and blood - with graceful curves and scrolls and impossibly thin strings, the purpose of which Charon cannot fathom.

It is beautiful in its uselessness.

 

**********

 

They trek together to Agatha’s house and both his Mistress and the dog get a bounce in their step on seeing the long bridge over the ravine.

She puts Charon behind her, knocks on the door, and stands a respectful distance back.

“Last time, she almost shot me,” his Mistress whispers to him behind her hand, and Charon wonders just what kind of person this ‘Ags’ is.

An ancient woman opens the door and almost squeaks with what Charon thinks is happiness.

“Lucky! Pretty-Boy!” she exclaims, and Charon definitely knows she speaks of the dog and not him. She pets them both, the dog on its ears and his Mistress on her mohawk, clucking over it and saying something about ‘crazy kids these days’.

“Oh! And you!” the old woman says, staring up at him with absolutely no fear. “I don't know you, young man, but if you're with Lucky, then you're alright in my book.”

“This is my friend, Charon,” his Mistress explains, using that word that has been driving him mad.

“Good to meet you, dear!” the woman squeaks, shaking his hand and shooing them all inside and into chairs, pressing bottles of water in their hands. The dog prances around on its hind legs and Agatha tosses treats and claps her hands like a proud parent when it snatches each cleanly from mid air.

“You must be starved!” she says, bustling around the house, throwing together a meal.

“Agatha, I can help-”

“Oh no, you don’t! You sit right there and drink your water!”

“Yes, ma’am,” his Mistress says meekly, taking a placating drink.

“That's better.”

If his Mistress obeys her, this is a woman not to be trifled with, no matter how old she may be.

Soon, Agatha has heaping plates of food made, squirrel bits fried up crispy with Insta-Mash and a side of apples.

“You remembered!”

“Of course I did, child! Now, Charon, tell me your favorite, and I'll have it for you next time.”

This world he has just walked into, one of warmth and love and things so foreign, it makes him want to tear something apart.

“Brahmin steak,” he chokes out instead.

“Steak it is then! Now, eat! Then we’ll talk.”

They eat, his Mistress happily, Charon with difficulty, and Agatha talks like he has never heard anyone talk before.

“Crow got a new dog, you know. Pretty thing. Great big blue eyes. He calls it a husky, but I say it's a mutt like all the rest. Anyhow, he says Canterbury Commons is odd these days, something about ants and machines at war. Couldn't understand a word of it, but you know how he talks, tribal-child that he is. Strange folk. Not bad, mind you, won’t say that about ‘em, just strange. Oh my goodness, and I've been hearing about you, young lady!”

“Me?!” his Mistress splutters, mouth full of apples.

“Yes, you! The _things_ you get up to! Oh, I hear it all, and don't think for a minute I don't! Traders need gossip like air, you know. Crow heard it from Doc that you tried to pay him with pre-war money! Can you believe it, Charon?! _Dollars!_ ”

Actually, that is one thing about his Mistress that Charon can believe.

“Come on!” his Mistress whines. “I was new here! How was I supposed to know you people use trash as money?”

“Well, you just remember what you came up from, that's what! Keeps you humble! Now, what else? I heard from Doc, because he heard it from Moriarty - devil take that man - that you killed that poor hooker in Springvale. Is that true?”

“Of course not! But Moriarty thinks Silver’s dead, so I guess you'll have to keep spreading that rumor around.”

“Ha! I thought so! I told him as much, and I’ll tell him again, too. Now, I want to warn you, I heard from Wolfgang that you’ve got a price on your head and Talon Company’s aiming to collect.”

“Yeah, I think somebody’s mad I shot Mr. Burke in the face. He wanted me to blow up Megaton, you know. For _five hundred caps!”_ his Mistress says, as if people had not done more evil for less.

It is beginning to dawn on Charon just what kind of person has come to hold his contract.

“Well, I don’t hold with violence,” Agatha sniffs, “but these are mighty strange days. Anyhoo, the last time Harith came around, he said you helped a slave in Rivet City. And found that poor little Wilks boy a new home. Oh, and his hired hand won't shut up about you.”

His Mistress groans and lightly beats her forehead on the table.

“Well, good, because I didn't much like the look of him. This one you've got now is a lot better. Looks like he’ll take proper care of you.”

Both Charon’s and his Mistress’s eyes go wide, but Agatha is off again before anyone can get a word in.

“Now, Wolfgang has it on very good authority from Quinn that you darn near killed yourself outside of Underworld. Then you went and rescued a bunch of mercenaries?”

“Charon helped,” she grumbles. “And the Rangers are _good_ mercs.”

“Oh, I know. Harith’s heard fine things about them. That big girl of theirs keeps him flush buyin’ every 5mm he can get his hands on. Even had the nerve to tell him to quit pussy-footin’ around and just sell ‘em to her by the case so she can shoot more mutants. And then I hear from Crow who heard it from Doc who heard it from Wolfgang who heard it from Megaton’s sniper… whatshisname? Oslo? Sweden? Shoot, I'm getting so old I can’t seem to remember. Anyway, he said you were just sicker ‘n a dog! Look a little purple around the eyes, but otherwise fit as a fiddle to me. Speaking of which-”

“Holy sh- I mean, ‘Holy cow-”

“That's a good girl.”

“Anyway, we found it! It was there, just like you said. The Vault was...abandoned...but look!”

His Mistress presents the violin to Agatha, along with paper booklets filled with contents Charon cannot read or understand, but can recognize for what it is.

A language of music.

For what may be the first time in her very long life, Agatha has nothing to say.

“Oh, Lucky!” is all she can squeak out before grabbing his Mistress and pulling her into an all encompassing hug. Agatha starts to cry, and his Mistress pets and preens and murmurs soft things into her hair, and finally the crying stops with a few sniffles.

“Oh, dear. Haven't had a good cry like that in an age. Rain for the soul, I say.”

“Ags, I don't even know if it's any good. I didn't dare open it, but-”

“Hush, child! It's perfect, even if it doesn't play a note. Now, let's see what we have here…”

The case opens with a hiss, and Charon cannot help but stand to peer into this time capsule of a woman who had given her life up to music, and is assaulted with scents from another age, all smells for which he has untried names for.

 

_Maple-wood_

_Beeswax_

_Pine-sap_

_Lavender_

 

That last scent, herbal yet sweet, sends a pulse through his brain.

 

_She's woven a crown of purple flowers for her blonde hair, and she runs between the rows, stirring up their scent with her fingertips. There's dirt on her knees and a smudge across her nose, and she's breathless in his arms when he catches her. “I'm all dirty” she says laughing, but he kisses it away because to him, she's perfection._

 

Charon wants to pull something’s limbs from its body and listen to it scream.

But his Mistress asks Agatha to play for _him_ , and as the first few notes are wrought from the new violin, it is all he can do to fall into a chair instead of on the floor.

He does not know what he expected. Perhaps something loud or high pitched and grating. Or like his Mistress had said, something mean and angry enough to ‘tear out all the bad pieces’. But he is made entirely of bad pieces and jagged edges, and to take them all would be to kill him outright.

But whatever she pulls from the strings with her old fingers is like nothing he has heard before, and will likely never hear again. A soft minor/major key that changes from one to the other like tides go in and out, one full of unnamed promises, of things that could be or maybe already were, of decisions to be made and roads taken and some still to be discovered. The notes roll over each other with all the fluidity of water, up faster and faster into the ceiling and far past, but then back down, melodies chasing each other until they tire and finally come back to earth.

And as the last note shivers into silence, Charon finds that nothing has been broken. Nothing has been torn away.

But maybe something has been ground down to a less jagged point.

 

**********

 

“Holy shit on a shingle this is nice,” she murmurs from the second floor of her Megaton home. He thinks she does not mean to be heard, but the metal balcony makes echoes of her splashing.

Charon is sitting rigidly on the couch, holding the book she had given him to read, but never in a million years could he possibly comprehend its words right now.

The breathy sighs and little moans she is making are positively sinful.

He is over two hundred and thirty years old, if his math is right. He is, unfortunately, a ghoul. But he is also still most certainly a man, and the sounds she is making are driving him crazy.

He hears the water sluicing down her body and back into the scavenged bath tub, and it makes him shiver.

His Mistress flings back the curtain and pads barefoot down the steps. The khaki cargo pants slung low on her hips speak of the weight she has yet to gain back, and paired with the short undershirt, their loose fit shows the top of the ‘ _v’_ where her legs hook on to the rest of her. A drop of water runs down the corded muscle of her neck and into the little notch at the base of her throat. It sits there, glinting in the light, and he stupidly wonders what it would taste like if he licked it off her skin.

He had seen her in less, practically naked, but she had been pale and sick and shivering, but here she is now, healthy and alive and clean, smelling like lazy contentment and the soap she makes.

"I finally feel human again," she says, as if she is somehow not just as stunning when she has a face full of dirt and someone else’s blood in her hair. "Do you want a bath? I'll get some more water heated up, half an hour tops."

The question snaps him out of his reverie, but he goes unwillingly. "You need not trouble yourself.”

She frowns, that now familiar thundercloud gathering.

"Charon?"

This is also becoming familiar. She says his name in question, and it usually means something important and/or uncomfortable is about to happen.

"Yes?"

"Did I ask you if I should ‘trouble myself’?"

"No,” he says slowly.

She is looking patiently at him, as a long suffering teacher would look at a struggling pupil.

"So, do you want a bath?"

While he is compelled to answer truthfully, he finds it is easier than he expected.

"Yes.”

She grins and sashays out the door and to the roof to turn on the heating element.

Charon can only watch her walk away, and seeing the twin dimples of her lower back, he can think of nothing else but how his thumbs would line up perfectly if he took her hips in his hands from behind.

Baseball, mirelurks, brackish puddles of radioactive sludge - Charon tries to think of anything else, but it only helps a little. She comes back in, flopping down on the couch next to him. Thank god she had finally broken down and gotten rid of the bed and that absolute misfortune of a lamp.

She puts her bare feet up on the coffee table, wiggles her toes, and sighs happily.

“Nothing better than clean toes.”

 

**********

 

The hot water is wonderful - even if only because of its rarity - and the only thing that could make it better is if it were irradiated. The soap does not smell like anything, and contrary to popular belief, ghouls really do not either. They did not so much rot as just dry up and fall apart. Most of the time, it was at first, when they started to turn. Bits of skin just...sloughed off. Then it stopped or slowed down for hundreds of years, a time capsule of ruin. The only reason Patchwork was such a mess was his habit of drinking enough booze and huffing enough Jet to kill ten humans ten times over.

As he tries to truly relax for the first time in what seems to be years, he comes to a few conclusions. This employer, his Mistress, is like no one he has met in his entire life.

She is both strange and dangerous.

Traveling with her, he felt more human than he had in, well, since he can remember. She asks his opinion, both on small matters, from advice on tactics to monumental matters of morality, and seems to truly _value_ everything he said. She is offended when people do not treat him with the same respect she demands, and he thinks that if she had been able, would have fought them over it, even killed them.

That is his duty to her, to kill and maim and destroy for her, and yet she takes the same burden on herself for him.

“ _Touch him and you die.”_

Charon has never been so confused and anxious in all his two hundred years.

First his Mistress was not a monster, and then she was, but now she is not. She is vicious and cruel and kind and generous, and he feels he may come unhinged from the dizziness of it all.

Not once has she been unkind to him, not once has she commanded him to do something that would harm his person. If anything, she makes unreasonable demands for him to protect himself and to ‘be careful’.

She had asked nothing of him that, if he believed in hell, would send him there. The old man in the minefield had rubbed him the wrong way at first, but Charon now understands her scars and how she got them, and thinks of his own scars and knows he would have done the same and worse.

And she is right. There is no God here but yourself, and justice only exists where where you make it. And her book of truth seems to have pages torn from his own, because the wages of sin is almost always death.

Charon’s head is likely to explode with so much existential thinking, but like her turning gears and cogs, he cannot stop.

She is soft for all her sharp edges.

_‘You could have been hurt!’_

_‘Are you happy?’_

_‘What you think does matter.’_

And she is soft in all the other places a woman could be.

The outfit she had wiggled herself into was scandalous with its acres of bare skin and tight fit, and even though she looked terribly uncomfortable, that was almost part of its attraction.

“ _Do I look okay?”_

Anxious, as if unaware of her own curves and sleek lines and how they made most men and some women she met follow her with their eyes.

And all he could stutter out was a stupid ‘yes’.

This deadly woman who mercilessly destroys her enemies is somehow unsure of her own body, and it makes her even more fierce.

But she is still soft in other, more dangerous places.

She had recoiled at the violence of the slaver known as Forty, shocked by a level of brutality she should have been used to by now. Reeling back into Charon like she had been clocked in the face, he had held her up. He had not really wanted to let go of the soft, bare skin under his fingers, but appearances had been everything in that endeavor, and he had grudgingly let her go.

But even for all her softness and insecurities, she could still wield those curves and lines like a weapon.

When she remembered what they had come for, it was like a switch had flipped. Sex and cruelty settled over her like a sheet of silk as she stalked up to the unfortunate Grouse like a predator, and Charon was the lucky bastard that had the privilege of watching it all.

From behind.

But when it was just the two of them, alone, the sheet had fallen away and seemed to strip a little something along with it.

“ _I'm so sorry,”_ she had said, over and over like a litany of regret, and it was not the empty, half-hearted sorry’s that everyone fools themselves with. These were heavy with a kind of meaning that he still does not understand.

That is what makes her extremely dangerous.

He shivers and notices how cold the water has gotten. Quickly drying off, he grimaces as he pulls on his bloodstained, dust caked armor. There is just something awful about being clean and then having to put something filthy back on.

She looks up from her book as he descends the stairs and the thundercloud rises.

“You don't have to live in your armor, you know.”

“I do not have anything else.”

If it was possible, the thundercloud gets darker.

"You don't have anything else. You’ve got a shotgun, a big ass knife, and some armor."

"Yes."

"Well, fuck it then,” she says, and he has no idea what she means.

She trots up the stairs, but turns back slowly. "And then, we have a few things to talk about."

 

**********

 

“What’s the going rate for a merc? Bodyguard work, I mean.”

“I would not know.”

“Well, I'll ask Rome. You call yourself an employee, which I think is shit, but if that's true, then you need paid. Back pay, too.”

He grunts at her, because he is not sure what else to say. _‘All I possess, both material and immaterial, is yours_ ’ is a bit difficult to get around. Charon decides that he will treat any payment he receives from her as an investment. In keeping well supplied, he can render himself more effective to her protection.

“And,” she says dramatically, unpacking the crate she had lugged down the stairs, “you need gear. From now on, we split everything 50/50. You or I find something you like, it's yours. Keep it, sell it, whatever.”

She starts pulling things out. “I've been on the lookout for stuff you might like, but I wasn’t sure if you'd even take it. You can be pretty stubborn, you know.”

“You are not exactly tractable yourself.”

She sticks out her tongue at him.

“Child,” he growls.

“Peter-fucking-Pan” she shoots back, turning her attention to the crate.

A sturdy combat helmet complete with what looks suspiciously like the set of armor she had received from that Reilly woman, but upgraded within an inch of its life, comes out first.

“Oh yeah! I made that for you! Maybe it's too heavy, but I fixed it up. See, there's spots for shotgun shells and stimpaks and…”

Charon swears he is listening, but what he is really doing is staring at the veritable cornucopia she is unpacking on the coffee table in front of him. Rations, stimpaks, both purified and irradiated water, clothes, shotgun shells and parts, trade magazines, a few books, grenades and mines, and a blue _toothbrush,_ still in its plastic wrapper.

It looks like someone held up a pack brahmin by the hind legs and shook it.

“Oh! And I had Simms make this for you. I found the chain...but here!”

She motions for him to hold out his hand. Charon obliges and she holds out a steel chain, the kind that held pre-war dog tags, but this holds a single key.

“It's to the house,” she explains, letting the chain pool into his palm. “You know, since it's your house now, too.”

He looks back up to her goofy grin, full of white teeth with only one slightly crooked one. He pockets the key on its chain and she smiles wider.

“Well, go on! Have a good rummage! There’s a box by your bed with a combination lock, so you can put whatever you want in there.”

Hesitantly reaching out, he touches the black t-shirt that is on top of the pile, and draws his hand back as if it had bit him because it is soft - much softer than he imagined it would be.

He squeezes his eyes shut because it is all too much.

 

_She laughs and twirls in her new pink skirt, and he feels its softness on his fingertips as he catches her hips and holds her out for inspection. "Pretty?" she asks, as if there could possibly be any other answer. "Pretty," he replies, but as he runs a soft hand over her belly that is growing like a promise, he decides that 'pretty' is not exactly the word he is looking for._

 

"I need," he chokes as he stands up, chair flung against the wall in his crushing need to escape, "to get out."

"Are you alright?” She is up and around the coffee table and coming too close, far too close.

"I need to get out!" he roars at her, shoving her away, but he forgets how small she is and she goes careening backwards into the locker with a resounding crash. He is frightened by his own voice and he has put hands on her, has thrown her into a wall, and he thinks that his brain is going to explode because it all _hurts_.

“I need to get out,” he whispers, and she looks up at him from the floor with big, bright eyes and nods once.

He flees, exactly like the coward that he is.

 

**********

 

The roof is where Charon automatically climbs, where he had spent some of the best days in recent memory - drinking old whiskey and reading an ancient book of revenge, alone, with no one wanting _anything_ from him.

He has been sitting up here for who knows how long, head between his knees, trying and failing to get his ragged breathing under control.

Charon is waiting for her to come punish him. He had put hands on her, had probably injured her. His whole purpose, his sole reason for existing, was to keep her safe and not only had he failed, he had failed so spectacularly that there can be no redemption for what he has done.

He hears irritated huffing, grunting, scrabbling, and softly murmured curses.

She sits beside him, mirroring his drawn up knees, but she stares up at the stars. She is quiet for a while, but as she begins to talk, he knows she is not here to punish him, at least physically. However, he knows from experience that wounds of the mind are even harder to heal.

"The stars are my favorite, you know," she says softly. "No matter what happens, they're always there, always the same. They move, sure, but they never change."

He says nothing, but finds that he wants her to stay and talk about the stars or anything really, if it will distract him from the memories of pink skirts and curving bellies filled with something that is - was - surely his once.

"See the bright ones that look like a great big spoon? That's the Big Dipper, or Ursa Major, the Great Bear. Somewhere near, there's a Little Bear, but you can't see him because of the city lights. There's a story about them. Well, almost every star you can see has one."

As he listens to her tell ancient tales about people turned into bears with long tails because a remorseful god flung them into the sky to become stars, he realizes it is not the story that he is listening to, but her voice. It is soft and reverent and its peaks and valleys wash over him, quiet and heavy as moonlight.

"But if you follow the lip of the spoon up," she traces an imaginary line with her finger, "that star, there, that's Polaris, the North Star. It might not be the brightest, but no matter what season it is, it always points north."

He thinks about how short life is, even as a ghoul, when compared to the infinite space above him. He finds that his breathing has slowed and his limbs are loose.

"The stars don't change, but people can."

She squeezes his wrist once and is gone.

 

**********

 

Charon looks up at the wide expanse of dark sky and understands now why she prefers the night. It is cool and calm, the moon washing everything clean, or as clean as the Wasteland can be. And while he knows she is dangerous and will likely get them both killed with her ironclad promises to people that do not deserve them, he could think of worse ways to go.

 

**********

 

Charon slips through the door quietly, pleased that his Mistress had learned a bit of self-preservation and locked it behind her. She had given him a key, after all. She had not ordered him to put it on, not like a collar on a dog, but had put it in his hand and let him do what he wanted with it. He finds he does not mind wearing it. It settles cool around the back of his neck and over his collarbones and he thinks he might remember the feeling from long before.

She had told him in no uncertain terms that this was _his_ house, too. _His_ room. _His_ locker. _His_ bed. For as long as he cared to stay, as if leaving was an option. But she had offered to take him wherever and to whomever he preferred, and he thinks that her promise, like the rest she makes, is not empty.

The pile of things - _his_ things now, he supposes - is still there, exactly the way he had left them. He touches the fabric of the black t-shirt, steeling himself for another memory, but nothing comes. Changing out of his filthy armor and into a pair of sturdy fatigue pants and the black shirt that had frightened him so badly, he thinks between the dog, the robot, and Megaton’s walls, that both he and his Mistress can sleep at the same time without fear of getting their throats slit in their beds.

He shoves a chair firmly under the doorknob anyway.

His Mistress had tried her best to stay up and wait for him, but no matter what she might say, she is still weak. Charon had watched the stars fade and the sun rise, and it has been light for hours now, far past her time to sleep, and like a child at Christmas Eve, she could not keep awake. She is asleep on the lumpy couch and she is dreaming.

And it is not a good dream.

She thrashes and mumbles and whimpers, threatening to dump herself off the edge and right onto the floor.

Charon looks at her, watches her fight in her sleep, hands scrabbling at thin air, legs kicking at unknown assailants, and he gently scoops her up to take her to her own room. She snuggles into his chest and he wonders if she would do that if she was awake.

He thinks not.

But as he puts her into bed, she latches on like she did when she had been so terribly sick and he remembers how she had held his hand unflinchingly, little fingers roaming all over his skin, her touch hot enough to make him both pull his hand away and scream at himself not to.

“Stay,” she mumbles, and more than half asleep, she does not understand that she has given him a command.

He could stand guard by the wall. He could sit in the chair with his shotgun across his knees, like he usually does. But he knows what she thinks she wants. The command is vague, and the chip does not care how he does it, so long as he does.

Charon finds that he himself does not care either. And why should he? Is life not short compared to stars? Why should he not have something good, if only for a moment?

He scoots her over to the wall and climbs in beside her. She curls up, small body pressed against his, face still buried in his neck, and he dares to touch her corkscrew curls, dark enough to be black, but shot through with sun-bleached copper. The sides are growing in, short stubble, and he wonders if she will shave it again, or if it had just been a passing moment of madness.

But in the dim light, he sees the contrast of silk curls twined through his ruined fingers and he quickly takes his hand away. Just because he wants something good does not mean he deserves it.

And she certainly does not deserve a monster like him.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I think of Agatha playing her own music, the things she plays for Lucky and Charon, I tend to think of Joep Beving. While Beving is a pianist and not a violinist, the sentiment is the same.


	16. Songs and Stories

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry for the slow update. I wrestled with this chapter, and I'm still not entirely sure I came out on top. Maybe it hasn't exactly beaten me, but it definitely punched me in the mouth and stole my wallet.
> 
> Enough self-pity, I suppose. Fair warning: typical Wasteland drug abuse, violence, and sexy-times. Is it bad that I was feeling a little blue and had to write a bit of smut to make myself feel better?
> 
> So, without further ado, musical inspiration brought to you by:
> 
> Re - Nils Frahm  
> The Ritual - Paper Tiger  
> Theremin - Edward Scissortongue  
> How Low - Jose Gonzalez  
> Killing for Love - Jose Gonzalez  
> You, Again - Fabrizio Paterlini

The bed is fantastically warm. Lucky’s heavy and comfortable and she squeezes her eyes tight because she _really_ doesn't want to wake up.

So she says fuck the world, she's sleeping for another eight hours if she can convince her internal clock to shut the hell up. Burrowing into the warmth like a molerat in dirt, she is shocked to find the warmth is not her bed, but a body next to her.

A big one that smells like hot sun on dusty leather with a tang of copper-metal mixed in.

Lucky knows who this body belongs to, and she doesn't even want to breathe for fear it might get up and walk away. But it moves, a leg under hers, torso shifting slightly.

“Hey.”

Charon says nothing and stares at the ceiling.

“Did I get drunk?” she asks plaintively. Not that she's a lush, but that would be the only way to explain a Charon in her bed. All her clothes are still on, for which she has a distant pang of irritation.

“No.”

“Did _you_ get drunk?”

He shuts his eyes like he has a headache. “No. You commanded me to ‘stay’.”

“Shit. Did I drool on you?”

He snorts and Lucky smiles a little. “I'm sorry. I must have been sleep talking.” She props herself up on an elbow and looks at him. He doesn't look _angry_ exactly, but he doesn't look happy either. If anything, he looks worried.

“Last night, I offered you violence. You have the right to retaliation.”

Now she's worried. She doesn’t understand why he keeps saying things like that. But, two hundred year-old habits won't be broken in a few months.

“We both know that’s not gonna happen. It was an accident.”

He looks at her, maybe through her. “How many more accidents will it take for you to understand what I am?”

“The one where you hurt me because you mean to. Because you want to.”

He stares at her.

“Do you?” she asks softly, almost afraid of the answer she’ll get.

“No,” he says with such firm conviction and steel that she knows he's not lying.

Something nasty had happened in his head last night, more nasty than usual. It’s almost like when a robot’s circuit board overloads. Lucky thinks it has something to do with the wires in his brain. Maybe they were breaking down or something, because he had been doing it a lot lately. Not all the time, but every once and awhile, he’d hear something, see something, touch something, and he’d just...freeze. Only for half a moment, not long enough that most people would notice, but Lucky had always watched him. Always tried to read him like one of her books. And this book is way more interesting than all the rest because it’s got a lock on it just begging to be cracked.

Lucky’s not completely sure what's going on with him, but what she does know is that  the look on his face after an episode is just _wrecked._

But it's okay. Lucky understands. She's just glad that she was alone in her own months of crazy. He seems to be handling his crazy a hell of a lot better than she did.

Is. Whatever.

“Well, alright!” she says. “Say, you might have to help me out with this whole contract thing. I never meant to keep you stuck in my bed.”

He shrugs and folds his arms across his chest, the way he pouts when standing up, but he's still laying in bed, which is just adorable instead of intimidating.

“I am yours to command.”

“Not helpful. Maybe phrase everything in a question? Like this?”

He gives her the look that says ‘no matter how funny you think you are, you are not’.

“Okay, okay! Jeez. Fine.” She thinks, and chooses her words _very_ carefully, weighing each and assembling them for balance and clarity. “How about this? Barring combat, I order you to do whatever you want, whenever you want, unless it physically injures an innocent or either of us.”

He slowly turns his gaze from the ceiling to her face, and he looks absolutely _stunned._

“Is this a joke?”

“What?! Of course not! I mean, I know it won’t work for everything, cuz you ‘follow me for good or for ill’ or whatever-”

He slides out of the bed, almost falling over himself to get away from her.

“This is...it is…”

Standing in front of the door like he's trying to melt through it, stuttering and stammering, Charon looks _scared_ and she's suddenly very afraid she’s made a terrible mistake.

She doesn’t dare get any closer, but puts her hands up to show she means no harm. “Talk to me, big guy. What’s wrong?”

“Why?” he whispers, staring at her like she might be poisonous.

“Why what?”

“Why would you do this?”

“Because you’re a _person._ ”

“I am your weapon and your shield,” he says softly, and Lucky wants to throttle him.

“I don't need either of those. I need somebody I can trust.”

“You may trust me implicitly, so long as you possess the contract,” he says slowly, and he's finally calming down now that he's having to think instead of panic.

She laughs, but her heart hurts, and it's all the more painful because it's a more of a low-level, radiating throb rather than the quick, sharp pain of actually getting stabbed in the chest. Charon’s not her friend. Maybe he never will be, maybe it's not something he's even capable of. Maybe he just plain doesn’t want to. And in her naturally stupid way, she had thought he could be, would be, would _want_ to be.

“Well, that's some shit, huh? I might as well go give it away right now. Then you can just kill me and save us all some time and trouble.”

Charon looks at her, hard, like he's weighing a heavy thing. “If my employment with you should end, I would prefer not to harm you.”

All she can do is sit there and blink. It had seemed like tradition, for him to kill his old employer. She had thought it might be some unspoken clause in the contract.

“Is that some weird kind of compliment?”

“If you consider it so.”

Lucky’s head hurts. She's too hungry to think straight, and Charon is too confusing for her current blood sugar levels to figure out.

“Well, okay. I like you too. So, are you gonna explode if you have too many choices?”

He crosses his arms, pouting again, but he doesn’t seem angry, not like he had been on the road to Paradise Falls.

“I will not _explode_. I simply have no...experience...with choices.”

If she could tear the fingers off two hundred years worth of previous employers, she thinks she could make it her life’s work and feel that not a moment of it would be wasted.

“Okay!” she says chirpily instead. “So, let’s work on it. What are you gonna do first?”

He looks at her like the cheese has slid off her cracker, and he shakes his head, not because he's saying no, but the way you do when you've gotten hit in the face and you're trying to get the cobwebs out.

“I am going to...eat.”

She beams at him. “Awesome.”

Charon might not be her friend, not in the normal sense of the word, but she thinks whatever he wants to give will be enough.

 

**********

 

Charon is downstairs cooking breakfast, and it smells _amazing._

Lucky’s tickled pink that he finally chose something for himself, but she knows she has to do better. She's going to have to choose each and every word that comes out of her mouth very carefully.

Padding downstairs, she marvels at how clean the floors are under her bare feet. The whole house, really. Wadsworth takes his job as butler and housekeeper pretty seriously.

“Whatcha making?”

“Fried Cram and mirelurk eggs.”

“Huh. Didn't know you could cook.”

Charon goes still, spatula and pan unmoving.

“I did not either.”

“Is it something from before?” she asks softly.

He might always answer her questions, but not in a sentence that tells you anything. 'Yes'. 'No'. ' _Grumble-grumble-grunt'._  He doesn’t disappoint, but she gets the feeling he doesn’t really know either.

“Perhaps.”

Lucky doesn’t press. He's had enough excitement for one day, she figures.

The spatula and pan start moving again and she smiles.

 

**********

 

 _Christ-almighty, she's pretty,_ Rome thinks to himself for about the fiftieth time that day.

Rome’s been thinking a lot lately. A hell of a lot more than normal. In fact, his brain’s been thinking so hard and so fast, he swears he can hear it make grinding noises. And it's been thinking about stuff he's not used to thinking about. Silly, stupid stuff like life and the future and what both of his could look like.

A life without blood on his hands and a future not spent killing for caps.

This job’s easy. It's safe. It’s the kind of job you jump at the chance to take because you're so sick and fucking tired of it all that you could just about scream.

And then scream some more. Scream until your voice is so gone you don't even want it back.

It had taken him months to relax, to unknot the muscles in his neck and turn down the parts of his brain that tells him every dark corner and ceiling-high pile of junk hides somebody just like him, somebody that’s ready to slit his throat if he doesn’t keep his back to the wall and his eyes on the entrances and exits. Charon, that guy that guards Lucky like a rabid centaur, he hasn’t learned how to turn it down yet. Maybe never will. Some of them are like that, and if they’re human, they burn out quick. Maybe they last longer if they're ghoul, but what a fucking life.

And every day he has to remind himself that maybe that part of his own life is done with.

That he could start over.

Moira had come out the gates of Megaton to trade with the caravan he’d gotten work guarding. She’d been strange, all chatter-y and bright, hands going flutter-flutter and talking to strangers like friends.

“Somebody broke into the shop!” she’d said, just all busted up that somebody would go and do something so mean. “Well, they didn’t _break_ in. I sort of forgot to lock the door.”

Rome had decided it was good she lived in a town, because she'd never last a day outside.

And then she'd asked if he wanted a job. Like he didn’t already have one and his boss wasn’t standing ten feet away. But hey, Rome had never seen eye to eye with this guy, anyway. Dealt in slaves on the side, and that was a place Rome always drew the line. Kill somebody, sure. That's just business, just life. He wasn’t in the business of ruining people’s lives, he just got paid to end them. And he did it clean. Kept it professional, kept it as civil as killing people could be. No kids, though, no matter how many caps they threw at him. Fuck that noise. Rome didn’t need that kind of trouble in his dreams. Had enough stomping through there already.

But she hadn’t wanted him to kill anybody. Nobody at all. Just wanted him to guard her shop full of weird junk.

“Room and board included”, he'd demanded, and she'd looked at him as if the thought hadn’t even crossed her mind that it wouldn’t be.

Maybe it was a mistake, demanding a place to live in her shop.

She's everywhere. All the time. He couldn’t get away from her. Red hair and green eyes and pale skin and rain-drop laughs and ‘oh yah’s’ and ‘you betcha’s’. Bad cooking and small electrical fires and wild animals she drags in that he always ends up having to shoot. Her sweeping, her reading, her tinkering, her talking and humming and singing to herself when she builds something crazy that always ends up working like a charm. Maybe not the way she wanted, but damn if they all don’t kill stuff anyway.

But lately, he’s been thinking odder, sillier things, like the way her hair is so red he wonders if she does something to it or if nature had just gotten bored with blonde, brown, and black.

How every morning she stumbles down the stairs, throwing her hair up in a bunch at the top of her head like a magic trick as she goes, and how she's still only half awake when she gets to the bottom.

That every day, he’s the first person she sees, the first one she talks to, and when she smiles at him, all sleepy and soft and says ‘good morning’ like she means it, it makes his stomach do a funny flip-flop thing, that same _oh shit_ way it does when you hike downhill and your boot hits a loose rock that almost dumps you on your ass. Rome doesn’t know jack shit about science, but he's pretty sure stomachs aren’t supposed to do that on the regular.

And that’s just in the morning. Even now, smack dab in the middle of the afternoon, it's happening.

It's the ‘weekend’, something only proper people who lived in respectable places like Megaton and Rivet City did. Along with birthdays and last names and knowing who your dad was. So the shop’s closed for two whole days, and it gives her way too much time to mess with stuff.

She's been fooling around with some new weapon, made out of what she swears up and down isn’t a piece of a wrecked train. He thinks she might be fibbing because the damn thing’s supposed to use railroad spikes as ammunition.

“I’m not sure if it’ll kill anything,” she mumbles to herself thoughtfully, in that way she does when she thinks real hard about something, like she has to talk to make her brain work better. “Maybe it’ll just pin them to the wall.”

And turning one of the six-inch iron nails around in his palm, he thinks her brain can work in some pretty diabolical ways when it needs to.

That’s a new word he’s learned, by the way. _Di-a-bol-i-cal_. She’d explained it to him so patient and sweet. Did that with every new word. Beamed at him so bright when he’d read it on his own, like she was proud of him or something.

But right now, a piece of her hair has fallen out of its bunch and into her face. She blows a huff of air up at it, but that just makes it float around and settle back down exactly where it had been. She pushes it behind her ear with an impatient swipe, and now she's got a streak of gun oil mixed with rust across her cheek.

“You’ve got something, uh, right there,” he says, pointing to his own left cheek.

She scrubs at her right. “There?”

“Your other right.”

She scrubs again but that just spreads it around, all along her pale skin and crazy freckles that scatter across the apples of her cheeks like buckshot out of a sawed-off.

“Did I get it?”

“No, now you’re just smearing it everywhere-”

Rome doesn’t know how or why, but in three quick strides he's across the room and in front of her with her jaw in his hand, swiping the dirt off with his thumb.

But he already knew both the why and the how. He’s expected this for weeks, really. They'd been dancing around each other, always a few feet away, letting every opportunity to touch slip past and then pretend it was never there at all.

It was only a matter of time. He knew the why and the how, and just found out the when, but isn’t quite sure about the what yet.

He finds the eyes he always thought were just plain green aren’t plain anything. There’s flecks of gold-brown with a ring of some other dark, green-y color on the outside edges, and they’re open wide, looking up at him like she can’t decide if he’s dangerous or not.

Straight away he’d told her just exactly what he was, what he’d been. Didn't think it was right to keep secrets like that. Maybe so she'd understand and take back her job offer. But she'd just smiled up at him and said “Oh, that’s fine”, like it hadn’t mattered to her at all that he was a merc. Not quite an assassin really, because what he did wasn’t quiet or secret. It was loud and violent and was usually meant to send a message.

Maybe she’s just figured it out, because she hasn’t moved a muscle, maybe too scared. But maybe it’s something else.

_I bet she'd say she kinda likes you, too._

He wonders if Lucky’s wrong. She’s nuts, sure, but almost as smart as Moira, so maybe not. Lucky had given him the book and that had turned out pretty good. Moira had squeaked and thrown her arms around him in a hug, but had backed away with a bunch of ‘oh, jeez, I'm sorry’s’ until he told her to shut up and go read her book. He made sure to smile when he said it so she knew he was teasing, and the smile she had thrown back his way was...well, it sure was something. So yeah, the book had been good.

The other thing Lucky had given him was the advice that ‘there's no prizes for pussies’, so Rome does a real stupid thing.

He takes Moira’s cute little face in both hands and kisses her.

And holy shit, it's nice.

His fingers are in her hair and as more comes down from its bundle, it smells like ozone from her welder and something else, something warm, something... _her._ Her skin is smooth under his thumbs when he traces one across a cheekbone, and if he thinks that’s soft, her cheeks have nothing on her lips.

She makes a little sound, but he can't tell if it's a good one or a bad one, and then the fact that she's his boss and he still has to live with her after whatever this is crashes to the front of his brain and ruins everything.

He breaks away, and she's just sitting there, flushed up pretty, grease-stained fingers stealing up to her kiss-swollen lips like he'd bitten her there.

“Oh. Oh, wow,” she says in that little accent that he can never place, the one with the big o’s and the a’s that go flat at the ends.

“Shit. Sorry. Shouldn’t have done that-”

“Do it again.”

She’s beautiful, all big eyes and blushes, but she also looks _drunk_.

“Yeah, I don’t think-”

“Please?” she asks, and it comes out small and scared, like he might tell her no or something.

As if he ever could.

So he doesn’t.

Rome kisses her again, and she kisses him back, and it’s more than nice. Way more than nice.

She seems obsessed with his face, taking it all in with the tips of her fingers, trying to read it like a book, and the way her thumbs run along his eyebrows like they're trying to smooth out the worry lines he's gotten way too young makes him shiver. He decides it's been too long if someone just touching his face gets him all wound up.

But it's when her little tongue darts out into his mouth to taste him - that's when things start to get heated.

Her hands start wandering, down the sides of his neck, running along a collarbone, trying to touch everywhere there might be skin, dipping under the neckline of his undershirt and tugging on it like she’s trying to figure out if she can rip it off him. It’s then he remembers he's got about eight pieces of armor to her one flimsy mechanic's jumpsuit.

The skin of her neck is soft and hot under his mouth and she makes a pleased noise when he scrapes his teeth along her throat. He peeks a little, (because really, how could you _not_ ) and fuck she's beautiful, head thrown back with her eyes closed and lips parted, the blush of pink traveling down and disappearing under her collar and he wants to see just how far down it goes.

It seems like she might want him to go find out, because her hands have ahold of his hair, giving little squeezes and soft pulls when he hits a nice spot where her neck meets her jaw. And then she's unbuckling things, and she seems to know every fastening of his armor like she wore it herself. An arm guard comes off, a shoulder pauldron falls to the floor, she tosses the chest plate away like she's mad at it, but she works on armor like his every day, so it's really not surprising - and shit, she's gone and got his belt undone, too.

When somebody goes for the belt, you don’t have to think too hard to know what they’re after.

Clothes are coming off at a pretty quick clip now, coveralls peeled down to her waist with the arms pulled inside out, leather under-armor unbuttoned. She's got her hands up his shirt, hot and quick and all over, and she pulls that up over his head, too.

Her lips are back on his and she's kissing him like she's hungry, but so his he, his hands running along her sides, down her spine, and he decides that jumpsuits can get fucked because it was hiding an awful lot of nice things.

He pulls off her shirt because it's pretty clear there's nothing on underneath it and he wants to _see,_ damnit. She gives an irritated little huff when she can’t touch him and take her shirt off at the same time, but she holds her arms out and finally it’s off, and it turns out there's lots and lots to see. All her hair has come out of its bundle, and it's tumbling everywhere, longer than he thought it would be. She's almost a little round, maybe from living in town and not having to fight for every single thing, a tiny bit curvy with nice places to hold onto.

And her skin. He's never seen anything like it. Smooth and bright as a new shell casing, without a scar in sight, and he gets a crazy urge to check everywhere else. Rome’s full of them. Can't even remember where some came from. But her fingers touch them like they're something pretty, something to be looked at and admired.

She's got plenty of things to be admired herself, because she looks like the angel-lady from the drawing in one of Lucky’s books - the one hanging out naked in the clamshell - all curvy and pale and beautiful with her red hair falling in waves. Rome fills his hands with a set of perfect breasts - still can’t believe that stupid jumpsuit was hiding _these_ this whole time - and when he runs callused thumbs over the tips, the needy little sound she makes is perfect, too.

He sort of falls apart after that, because everything seems to happen at once. She's got a hand down his pants and she's got ahold of him with a grip that says she's not letting go anytime soon. A long, slow stroke from top to bottom and then everybody’s pants are either off or around their ankles. Her boots are somehow gone and the stupid jumpsuit is hanging off one foot, the workbench is swept clear and junk goes flying everywhere, her perfectly round ass is perched on the edge of it, she's got her mouth on his ear and pale legs wrapped around his hips, she's so wet under his fingers and he brings one up his tongue to taste her, and it’s fucking incredible, and with one smooth push, he's inside her.

Rome just about loses it. So hot and tight, it's like he doesn't quite fit.

She goes stiff as a board and grabs at him like she's drowning, letting out a quiet keening sound into his neck that he doesn’t quite understand the meaning of. But she's kissing at his neck again so he moves against her, not wanting to go too fast or it’ll all be over if he doesn't get himself under control. It's been...he doesn’t even know how long it's been, maybe that one-and-done brunette in Canterbury Commons. And rubbing one out with your boss upstairs, while a little kinky, was also kind of weird, so he hadn’t done that often either.

But right now, he’s in just about as deep as a person can get into somebody else, and she's shivering and shuddering and has herself plastered against him like she's doing her level best to climb inside him, too.

“You okay?” he asks her because she's shaking like a leaf.

“Mmmm,” she says into his neck, which kind of isn't an answer at all.

“Hey. Look at me.”

She does, and her eyes are huge and shiny with their goldy-brown flecks and Rome’s pretty sure he actually understands that saying about 'getting lost' in someone's eyes.

“You sure you're okay?”

“Yes,” she says, taking his face in her hands and kissing all the breath out of his lungs. Like she wants him more than just whatever this is. Like she wants a lot more. Wants everything.

Well, whatever she wants, Rome thinks he'll give it all and consider it a bargain.

He doesn't last long after that. She's draped over him like a winter coat, hands running all over, mouth kissing and tongue licking at every bit of skin it could reach. It's when she takes his earlobe between her teeth like it's something good to eat that he comes undone.

And goddamn.

That workbench and his hands on her hips are about the only thing holding him up. Pulling out, just about the only effective contraception in the Wasteland, is second nature by now and her poor workbench gets something it probably didn't expect.

But he knows she hasn't let loose yet. With something that tight around him, he'd know five seconds before it even happened. That's fine, though, cuz he's got plans. Lots of plans. He's going to put his tongue between her legs and make her scream his name, can just about imagine the noises he can get out of her, can imagine how she'd look all spread out and waiting for him, long line of her throat when she throws her head back, how her fingers would feel in his hair when she pulls at it, so he sinks to his knees to do just that-

“Moira, honey.”

“Hmmm?”

“Why are you bleeding?”

She doesn’t say anything right away and it scares him.

“Moira?”

“Oh. Well, that, um...it happens sometimes.”

“Sometimes?”

She looks down at him with eyes that he had thought were just glossy-green, but are really filling up with tears.

“Sometimes. Usually when it's your first time.”

Fucking hell.

“Why didn’t you tell me? I wouldn’t have done that.”

A big fat tear rolls down a cheek and _goddamnit,_  he's in big trouble now. Never did like to see a pretty woman cry. Especially this one. This one does things to his brain, to his gut, and that one tear just about kills him.

“You didn’t like it?” she says so quiet, like it's a secret she doesn't want to tell.

 _Didn’t like it._ Yes, he’d liked it. He’d fucking loved it. Wanted to do it at least three times a day if she'd let him. What is she, crazy? How had she gone this long without finding somebody to bend her over a table or pin her up against a wall, or even just set her on top and let her go bananas-

“I liked it fine. But you should have told me.” He could just about kick his own ass. Wiping the tear away with the thumb of one hand, he grabs a clean rag from the stack she always kept on the top of the workbench for robot brains with the other. It’s not everywhere but it's definitely enough to make his stomach do a bad kind of flip-flop, the kind when a gun goes off and you’re not sure if you’ve been shot because it doesn’t hurt quite yet. He cleans them both up, and she sits still and lets him.

“I could have made it nicer for you,” he tells her, because he could have. Could have done a million other things than what he had just done. “Could have taken care of you.”

The tear is gone, and no more are coming out after it, so he considers that a win. But she's looking up at him like he's batshit.

“How?”

Oh lord. He can think of about fifteen different ways and ten after that, and every single one makes him shiver just thinking about it. Kicking off the one boot that had stubbornly stayed on, he picks her up like you would a little kid that has fallen asleep where they weren’t supposed to, and she buries her face in his neck and wraps her arms around him. Rome’s not a tall guy, only a head taller than Moira, but he's stocky and built like a brick shithouse, so carrying her the fifteen feet to his bed isn't a big thing.

“Lemme show you," he says soft into her hair.

"Okay."

And when she looks up at him with those gorgeous green eyes that say she trusts him, he thinks he’d be pretty fucking happy to show her every day for as long as she says 'okay'.

 

**********

 

“I just wanted to do laundry!” Lucky whines/shrieks as she dives behind cover. Team Ass-hat/Talon Company have gotten the drop on her. Again. Ass-hats they may be, but they sure seem to know their way around an ambush.

“Focus!” Charon snaps at her, and she's not even mad. She could almost grin at the way he's become more assertive.

“You bet, boss-man.”

He gives her a choked snort and a look that says, ‘This is obviously not funny, so through power of sheer will, I refuse to laugh.’

Lucky really did just want to do laundry. She’s run out of Abraxo, and the homemade soap left behind a fatty film that was great for skin, but not so great for fabric. There was this goofy little shop that some weirdo had set up with a neat Rube-Goldberg puzzle, the kind with a hundred moving parts just to do one easy thing. She hadn’t set it off (she’s not totally stupid) but there had been boxes on boxes of Abraxo in there. Sugar Bombs, too. Murphy was just gonna die when she brought all those back.

Her pack stuffed and the puzzle untouched, (it was just too _perfect_ to mess with) they’d moseyed outside and promptly gotten fucked right up.

There's a ton of Talon mercs this time, not the normal pack of four they usually send. It kinda sucks. Even if she kills the bastard who put the contract out on her, Team Ass-h,at will keep hunting her, just to be spiteful. It's personal now. She and Charon have killed _platoons_ of them, and sometimes in not so nice ways.

And that fuck-knuckle Three-Dog hadn’t helped.

Every time she blew up a pack of them, he just had to howl about it. Had to poke, poke, poke. Well, now they were poking back, and it’s really getting old.

They need to advance, close the distance between the last three, and she and Charon move up together like oil and water, sliding around each other so smooth and silent-

_BAM-BAM._

It's a sound made small with distance and Charon makes a strange, hitching stride, and then he's down in the dirt. Another round from the pack of three snaps into the concrete wall not four or five inches from her chest, so now she's being shot at from two different angles.

Lucky lobs a grenade, and she knows with her twiggy arms it will be a little too short, but it's not meant to blow anybody’s legs off, just to be a distraction. It works, because they hunker down and stay down.

_Step #1. Secure the scene._

The scene is not fucking secure, nor will it be in the foreseeable future.

_Step #2. If you are unable to secure the scene, get the patient to a secure location._

Charon is still, too still and right in the sniper’s alley, so she grabs him by the yoke of his armor and pulls for all she's worth.

It's not enough.

Bea had called her ‘just an itsy-bit’. Mrs. Palmer said she was ‘a perfect little doll’. Butch had called her ‘midget’, and Dad had called her his ‘Tinkerbell’.

It was good to be small. Sure, maybe you can’t reach stuff on the top shelf, but that was what your brains and a chair was for. You could fit places other people can’t, hide places other people would never look. Traps don’t spring as easy. People _always_ underestimate you.

Lucky wishes she weighed two hundred pounds right now.

Dogmeat - smart cutie-butt - grabs a shoulder guard between his teeth, sets his jaw, and yanks with all seventy pounds. It’s just enough to get the momentum going and get Charon behind a corner of concrete barricade. A bullet takes a chunk out of the concrete above her head. Yep, scene is still not secure, and this ‘secure location’ isn’t really secure at all. Skip to three, then.

_Rule #3. Assess the patient’s condition._

It's not good.

There's blood _everywhere._ All over his armor, already on her hands. He's caught one in the side of his lower chest, right in the space that goes bare when you move your arms as you run. That one’s gone through and through, and judging from the entry wound that looks almost as bad as the exit wound - how it doesn't look like people-meat, but just random-meat with splinters of bone and shiny-wet insides - the caliber is still a .308, but it's something meaner, like they'd blocked their ammo and turned them into hollow points. Lucky should know - she does that to her own. She'd read all about it in Guns and Bullets, and she's both happy and real pissed to report that they do a fantastic job of flattening out into a gnarly-ass ballistic the size of a dime.

He’s gotten one in the thigh too, and that one looks just as bad if not worse because there's no exit wound at all. But he's breathing, short and shallow and a little ragged, but still breathing.

“Charon?”

He sighs like he's just so _tired_.

“Talk to me, big guy. You gotta stay awake.”

“Yes,” he says, but his eyes are fluttering closed anyway. He's probably bleeding internally, but she doesn't dare stimpak the wounds directly. They’re full of dirt and God knows what else where she'd dragged him along the ground.

_Rule #4. Attempt to stabilize the patient in anticipation of transport to a licensed medical facility._

Hah.

She administers three stimpaks systemically, just to stop up the big blood tubes and at least keep his lungs moving air. Stimpaks are great, but only if you know how to use them. Heal up the outside first and forget the damage in the inside, and you've just made a person-shaped bucket of blood. Work from the inside out, no foreign object left behind. That's the motto of a good trauma surgeon. But this isn’t surgery. This is just keeping all the blood in.

“I gotta plug up all your new holes.” She talks as her hands work, trying to keep him awake. Our Lady Hope had contained all sorts of goodies, and the most interesting had been in the emergency room. Their trauma bay had needles and thread, chest tubes and tools, and some nifty little sponges that are expressly for plugging holes just like this.

She’s never used one, but it's pretty self-explanatory. Shove it in, push the plunger, and pray.

“I'm sorry, big guy. I can’t give you any Med-X or you’ll crash.”

“Yes,” he says, like it's the only word he has the energy to make.

“This is gonna hurt but I'll go as quick as I can.”

He barely even twitches.

He's not really stable, not like she’d prefer, but the mercs are making noises again.

_Rule #1. Secure the scene._

Well, it won’t be secure until they’re all dead.

She tells Dogmeat to stay and guard him, and by his snarled-up doggy-death-grin he always gets when he's royally pissed, he says he’s got this. She turns to go hunting but there's an iron grip on her wrist, not enough to hurt, but firm enough that she's not going anywhere.

“Mistress.”

“Yeah?”

He coughs and blood comes up, red, red, so very red. Charon, her Charon, the one that keeps the things from eating her, the one that likes old whiskey and steak so rare it's mooing, he sighs again, quiet and kind of sad.

“Please be careful,” he says as he starts to wheeze.

“You got it, big guy.” It comes out high and tight, and he doesn't look convinced, so Lucky does a silly thing and plants a kiss on his forehead. “I’ll be alright. Promise.”

His eyes are blue, and they're scared.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Lucky doesn’t like drugs, and she doesn’t have much experience with taking them. She might be what the medical textbooks would call ‘narcotic-naive’, but she's not stupid. She understands they have their uses, that they can be a godsend instead of a poison - that in the right hands, they can become a weapon.

So she grits her teeth and stabs the Psycho injector into the side of her neck like she fucking means business.

Charon's eyes get wide and even more scared, and he starts to say something, but coughs up more blood instead. She's gotta go, gotta get this place clear before she can help him.

Lucky’s never used it before, but she knows what it can do, what it turns people into. Even empty it looks dangerous - big and blocky in the palm of her hand. But now she's falling, falling into something, or maybe out of something...

The rage builds into a pretty, hazy sort of red, the kind of red that gets the girl on the mattress dancing, sets the violins singing, but it's not like Agatha’s songs. This croons cups full of poison and sings soft like wet things slithering out of their holes.

And it's so beautiful, this song, dark and dead like old stars, stars she’ll never see, never know, stars that have lost all their memories. Lost all their stories.

She wants blood. Wants all the blood. Wants it to run through her fingers, under her nails, between her teeth and over her tongue, wants to cover herself in it like armor because it's bad blood, blood from the people who aren’t people at all. _Animals, animals, fucking animals._ They don't deserve their blood. It's hers now, and she wants it.

_‘Love, love, love,’ chants the girl on the mattress when she sings her song and dances her dance. ‘My pretty, lovely, bloody girl.’_

She hunts these animals and delights in their fear.

Throws a grenade just to hear it boom, just to hear its voice, and they’re deaf and stupid now, still and cowering like the animals they are.

She dances like the girl on the mattress. Dances, dances, dances all around them - _one-two-three, one-two-three_ \- a ballroom waltz with slices and slashes and sweet little stabs, and the blood runs red. Red rivers, red oceans, red sky, red sand.

They make noises - silly, useless noises that mean nothing to anyone - God and herself least of all. She paints her face with their blood, dips her fingers in it and draws three lines down her face.

_One-two-three._

It's her blood now, hers to do with whatever she pleases.

The noises and the blood stop, stop singing their songs and running their rivers, but she wants more, needs more. She wants the one high-up.

She wants his blood.

Hunting, hunting and stalking and smelling the air, smelling the sounds. Smelling the fear, the shock, the terror. She's high up now, too. High up, but he’s running, he's running and the chase excites her, makes her smile and show her sharp teeth, makes her own blood run quick. But she has no blood, not really. Only has dark, cold, blank-story stars in her veins. She wants to see his warm blood on the outside, see what makes it so different from hers that he should be able to keep it all to himself.

He fights, he scratches and scrambles, makes his hands into balls and puts them in her face, paws at her neck and chest, singing loud about her paper with the promises written on it, about how he wants it, how he’ll snuff out her song to get it, but her want is more, its pull is stronger.

She wants to see what stories his blood may have to tell and how it tells them. How it can tell the future and knows the past. Wants to see if it will give her all its secrets, give her all its songs.

Violins, violins and wet, slithering things curled in cups of poison. His face is in her hands, and his eyes, music-eyes made of mud, they tell stories, too - stories of a pale horse and its rider’s name was Death, stories of dead men on boats with bees on their quiet tongues, stories of blood and songs sung of silent screams. She wants these mud-eyes gone, wants them to stop judging her, to stop singing - they sing so _loud._

 _'Monster'_ , they say.

She is. She knows she is. It's in her cold-star blood, in her poison-cup bones, so she puts her fingers in his eyes to steal their music and keep her paper-promise all to herself until he sings in screams no longer silent...

But someone else is singing. Someone familiar. Someone important. Their songs are different. Their color isn’t red.

“Lucky.”

Lucky? Who is that? Someone she knows? Someone who’s color isn’t red, too?

“Lucky, stop.”

This one knows best. Makes the red fade, makes it less hazy. Makes her warm and alive inside instead of dark like the dead stars with no stories.

“But he tried to take my paper. He tried to take my promises.”

“I will not let him.”

“He hurt you,” she hears herself sing to the dead stars in notes of red-sea tears. “I want his blood.”

“I know.”

He knows. He wants the blood too, but he’s so good. So patient. He knows how to wait, how to be still and really _listen_ to the songs, how to listen and find all the secret, hidden words in them.

She blinks up at him, and his face is in front of the stars. Living, turning stars, hot and bright. Stars full of stories and new songs. “But I want his blood. Can I please have it?"

“You do not need it."

His eyes are blue. Scared of her. Scared for her.

_One-two-three._

Lucky is sitting on a man. Sitting on the chest of a blubbering, bleeding, broken man.

Her thumbs are in his eyes.

“Charon?” Her voice is high and panicked.

“Yes?”

She doesn't even know what to say, what to think.

Her thumbs are in his eyes.

“I can’t, I don’t, the songs-”

He's got her under the arms, pulling her up and away from the man with her thumbs in his eyes. Setting her down gently, he checks her for wounds, but stands up and stalks over to the writhing man on the ground. Charon puts his boot on a hand and leans on it. Grinds it into the ground easy as putting out a cigarette. Bones break underneath. The thumb-eyed man sings again in screams not silent.

Charon smiles and he’s beautiful.

“What’re you doing?” she asks, numb with the notes of red slowly fading.

Charon doesn’t look at her, only looks at the thumb-eyed man.

“I would know what this man knows. And then I will know what the next one knows. And the one after that. Until there are no more left.”

“Oh. How come?”

“Because I am tired of this.”

“Well, the bees are in his mouth now. They’ll sing his stories to you.”

“I know. Close your eyes.”

“Okay.”

Her eyes may be closed, but her ears aren’t.

The thumb-eyed man, he sings and sings. Sings songs and sounds of pain and blood, defiance and fear, but Charon makes him sing different notes, the names of men marked for death and places that have no future.

He sings and sings until she covers her ears and sings right along with him.

 

**********

 

“How’re you still alive?” she asks, and she really wants to know.

“I used most of the stimpaks you gave me. Also, all the irradiated water.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. You did good work.”

It’s so quiet without the songs, without the violin-red and not-so-silent screams.

“You shouldn’t have been there. That wasn’t something for you to see.”

“Mistress.”

“Hmm?”

“Are you well?”

Lucky thinks about that. She had sat there and stared at nothing after he’d dragged the body away. He had wiped the blood off her face, out from between her fingers, and she had let him. He had fixed up her swollen-shut eye and broken cheekbone where the thumb-eyed man had punched her, fixed the bullet hole in her upper arm. Fixed a big gash on her stomach from the blade of a knife or bayonet.

She hadn’t felt any of them.

So no, she’s not well. Not well at all. But had she ever been?

No. Probably not. But he doesn’t need to know that.

“It’s so quiet now.”

“Yes. It is.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You did nothing wrong.”

Nothing wrong.

She had sliced them up into pieces like butchered animals. Painted her face with their blood. Gouged a man's eyes out with her thumbs.

And she had loved every second of it.

She buries her face in Dogmeat’s fur and he licks at the backs of her hands.

“I want to go home.”

 

**********

 

They finally do get home. Everyone stares at her, but it’s easy not to see them. They've never seen the violin-red. They don't hear the poison-cup notes, don't have the dead-star songs in their veins.

They're not the same as her, and she's glad.

She stands there in the doorway, not wanting to bring the blood in. It's everywhere. All over her. Probably inside some places, too.

Charon doesn't understand.

“Their songs are on me,” she says, rubbing at the dried and flaking blood on her arms. It gums up like the bits off a used pencil eraser.

His eyes are blue. Scared of her, scared for her.

“I see.”

Her hands are shaking, shaking so bad she can’t get anything off. It smells of wet metal and dead men with thumbs in their eyes and it all needs to come off or she’ll just-

Charon quietly closes the door behind him, locks it, and carefully, like he might frighten her, takes her armor off one piece at a time. Left arm, right arm, chest piece, left leg, right leg. The pants, the shirt, her boots, all come off until just her skivvies are left.

“Go take a bath,” he tells her, and she does.

After the blood is gone, out of her hair and off her face, she thinks about asking him to stay, to have something to hold on to, something to pull her back from getting lost to the dead-star stories. If anyone understands the songs of blood and poison-cup stories, it's him. But it wouldn't be fair.

She's a monster, and he's not.

 

**********

 

Lucky sleeps for three days straight.

For the next three days, she doesn’t say a word because there are none to be had. Charon doesn’t have any either.

The seventh day, she wakes.

“What’s wrong with me?” she asks over the breakfast he made. She still sees blood under her fingernails, even though she knows it's not real. It's just the last echoes of song in her head. It will fade. It should, anyway.

“Nothing is wrong with you.”

“My thumbs were in his eyes.”

Charon thinks about that. “Yes. They were.”

He looks at her, and she wonders if he can see the blood like she does.

“He deserved it,” he says, satisfied. “They all did.”

 

**********

 

She needs to do this. Needs to make things right. Needs to distract herself from the songs and the blood.

But this is going to be tricky, and Lucky's got one shot to do it right.

A single loose end could unravel the whole thing, and Nova and Gob will be the ones that will pay. But is this the right thing to do? Moriarty’s a sonofabitch. But this is a new level of cruelty she's delving into - diving right into it sober as could be - and if she goes through with it, she wonders if it will change her somehow.

Make her a monster. Or maybe make her a meaner monster than she already is.

Oh, she was sick way before the cups of poison and slithering things. The raider with his guts on the ground said so. Such a lovely pile of guts, too. Everything all out there in the open to be looked at, something no one in the whole universe had ever seen. Something that could never be put back in again and still be the same because she’d _seen_ them. She’d seen every bit of them - the best kept secret a person can have, all spilled out for her to study like a witch reading bones or tea leaves.

But what had scared her wasn’t the guts. What scared her was how she had liked reading them, that she had liked the secrets they told to her and her alone.

She hadn’t even pulled them out herself, Charon had, but they still had secrets for her. They knew her and recognized her for what she was.

 _‘Monster,_ ’ said the man with her thumbs in his eyes.

 _‘My pretty, lovely, bloody girl’,_ crooned the girl on the mattress.

Maybe not a monster yet, but soon. But isn’t this whole world inhabited by monsters? Sure, some aren’t as mean as her, some just barely-made monsters, or the ones that don’t know they are yet, but they're all monsters in one way or another. They’d all bite and rip and tear if they had to, but it's when you _want_ to, when you _need_ to-

“Mistress.”

“Hmm?”

“Please stop that.”

Lucky looks up to Charon, confused.

“Your leg.”

He's right. She's perched on the arm of the couch, locked in her own Crazy-Town of a head, and her leg is jittering with nervous energy.

“You’d tell me if I was doing something bad, right?”

“If that is what you wish.”

Lucky sighs. “Am I doing the right thing?”

Charon looks at her like he's never been asked such a question in his whole life.

“He is Gob’s Ahzrukhal,” Charon says quietly, and his voice has something under it, something thin and deadly as a garrote wire.

The nervous energy drains away, and purpose replaces it.

“Thank you.”

 

**********

 

They go to Moriarty’s to case the place. See who's there, who’s not. Who might be a threat, who might be likely to end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. She pretends to be a little sick, and it doesn’t take much acting. Oh, she can run and fight, but when the adrenaline fades, she's exhausted. If the last few months have beaten the shit out of her, the songs of blood had almost killed her.

Like always, Charon sees everything. He stays close to her, hand ready to catch her arm if she stumbles. But when they walk into the bar, a switch flips. He’s wary and somehow bigger than his already giant self. He doesn’t seem comfortable here, and Lucky understands. Bars can be dangerous.

The Ninth Circle certainly had been. She hadn’t realized the danger she had been in. If Ahzrukhal had gotten angry with her, gotten so irritated he decided she would be easier to deal with dead rather than alive, she knows Charon would have torn her apart. Oh, she would have died fighting tooth and nail, might have even hurt him, but he still would have killed her. Not because he particularly wanted to, but because he had to.

She wonders what kinds of things they made him do.

Judging from the walls and battlements he’s built tall and thick enough to put a medieval warlord to shame, she decides they made him do all of them. Every single terrible thing a person could do, they made him do each and every one.

Well, fuck that. She might only live a few years before another bigger, meaner monster kills her, but she’ll try her best to make those years better for him, however she can.

“I would take you home whenever you wish. Preferably soon,” Charon rasps quietly into her ear, and she shivers at both the sound of his voice and the words that she wishes had a different context.

“Glad to hear you have preferences, big guy,” she says, putting her arm in his like he's a gentleman escorting a fine lady to dinner. She grins up at him, and he tries his best to ignore her and scan for threats.

And when his scan turns up one Jericho No-Name as he sidles up close to Lucky’s other side, Charon’s muscles tense under her hand. Charon knows a raider when he sees one, retired or not. Either that, or they’ve already met, but the dagger glares of mutual dislike are dangerous all the same.

“Hey, Vaultie! Wanna fuck?”

“Answer’s still the same, bud. It’ll be the same next time, too.”

“Come on! Old Jericho can show you some things.”

Lucky laughs, but she's tired. “Emphasis on _old._ ”

Jericho takes one look at her hand on Charon’s arm and gets a nasty glint in his eye.

“Ghoulfucker, huh? You shoulda came to me first. I woulda showed you what a real man can do.”

She pointedly ignores him. The muscles in Charon’s forearm leap as he squeezes a fist, but she lightly bumps a hip into his leg. Jericho’s just drunk. A dangerous spot of drunk in between happy-buzzed and drool-y stupor, but still drunk. She really wants a Nuka-Cola, but Gob’s busy getting yelled at by some other Wasteland asshole, and she doesn't want to bother him. But Jericho’s a nasty old dog with a bone.

“A soft Vaultie like you? I could get ya alone. Wouldn’t know what hit ya.”

“Come on, man. I don't feel good.”

“Drop that rotter and I'll make you feel fucking fantastic. But maybe you just need somebody to show you who’s boss.”

And then Jericho does a very stupid thing. He grabs her wrist, roughly pulling her towards him.

_Crack._

Something snaps white hot at being touched without permission and she rears back and headbutts him. She doesn't know where it came from, or that it was even a viable option of self-defense, but with both arms occupied it seemed the only course of action. Her forehead connects and the blood spurting out of his nose is fucking _glorious_. Starbursts cloud her vision for a moment, and she decides headbutts are only a last resort. But when she turns grinning to Charon, he takes one look at her face and the small cut she can feel on her forehead, and promptly loses his everloving shit.

He's around her in a moment, faster than Lucky can imagine him moving, sweeping poor Jericho’s legs neatly out from under him, and he falls like a sack of drunken potatoes. A boot is in his back grinding his torso into the floor, and Charon has an arm, threatening to pull it out of its socket. Or maybe completely off his body, because Charon looks _angry._ Everyone has gone still, furtively moving against the walls and behind tables as the town bully gets his ass handed to him. Thank god Moriarty’s outside having a smoke.

“Apologize,” Charon growls.

“Fuck you, shit-bag shuffler!” Jericho says into the floor, and Charon sighs at his stupidity.

“Do not make me say it again.” Charon tweaks the arm and to his credit, Jericho doesn’t scream, but he lets out a muffled string of curses.

“Sorry, Cunt,” he finally grinds out.

Charon’s mouth sets in a grim line and Lucky is pretty sure he’ll break Jericho’s arm if she doesn’t do something, so she gives the back of his bicep a soft squeeze.

Charon grumbles. “He has injured you.”

“Nah. I’m alright. Promise.”

Jericho’s arm is released, and Lucky tries to help him up but he shakes her off.

“Fuck you,” he spits.

“Hey, man! You touched me first. I just touched you back harder.”

Jericho looks like he wants to touch her face with his fist.

“Aww, come on! No hard feelings! I'll even buy you a drink.”

Jericho’s glare darts suspiciously between the two of them, like he might be the butt of a joke but he’s too drunk to figure out the punch line. Charon stands with crossed arms and a disinterested face and Lucky plops on a stool, patting one on each side.

Charon sits calmly at her right, but Jericho still looks suspicious. Lucky just rolls her eyes at him and huffs. “Are you really gonna be a salty bitch and turn down free booze?”

Jericho wars with the indignity of sitting by the little girl who had probably broken his nose in front of the whole bar, but the lure of free alcohol proves too much. That, and he probably thinks it's way too early to get kicked out. He sits on her left with a grunt, and Gobbie practically throws a glass of whiskey at him.

“Nuka-Cola for me. Whatcha want, big guy?”

“Water.” The eloquent look he gives her says he remembers all about the drinks with the piss in them and how she had gotten her name.

“Good choice.”

Gobbie gets their drinks, and flees.

“Fine. You got your shot in, Vaultie,” Jericho says grudgingly. “But you're still a cunt.”

“Mmhmm. But after what you did to my house, you deserved that and more, you crusty old dick.”

Jericho sniggers into his whiskey like a kid whose prank was just discovered.

“Yeah. Totally worth it. Hey, where the fuck you pick up _that_ thing anyway?” He says jerking his head towards Charon.

“Charon is not a thing, he's a good friend. Unlike you, a twat-waffle with no friends.”

Jericho glowers at her but knocks back a whiskey, sneezing blood into his empty glass. “Ow. Did you really have to do that? I was only playin’.”

“And now your face is crooked as shit and you know better. Lemme see your nose.”

“Nose?”

“The one I broke with my forehead, idiot. Lemme fix it.”

“No,” he says petulantly, crossing his arms and not looking nearly as cute as Charon when he pouts.

“What? You wanna be uglier than you already are?” Lucky takes a cleanish bar rag and wipes the blood off. Jericho shies away, but she's already got his nose between her fingers and a hand at the back of his head. She relocates it with a muffled snap.

“ _Now_ we’re even.”

“Oh, you _bitch_ ,” he moans, gingerly poking his now straight nose.

“Another whiskey, please!” she calls out sweetly.

 

**********

 

Lucky makes sure to get Jericho black-out drunk. The things he babbles about to her are _shocking_. Things he’s done, places he’s been, people he’s killed - but what’s most surprising is how shitty he feels about it all. He tells her about Evergreen Mills and all the raiders there. She couldn't have gotten more information if she had beaten it out of him. Lucky promises herself not to be so mean to him and makes an only slightly more sober Nathan lug his ass home so he doesn’t fall face-first into the Pool of Atom and cook to death.

Somebody should really put a fence around that thing.

Nova’s upstairs, locked in her room with a client who hasn’t bought an hour, but the whole night. Gob is looking tired and probably wishing they'd just go home. Moriarty’s in the back, counting up caps and liquor stocks, and Lucky decides she won’t get a better moment.

“Take a break, Gobbie. We’ll watch the bar for you.”

“Are you nuts?!” he whispers at her, eyes darting with fear. “I can't just ‘take a break’! I'll be black and blue!”

“Get out. Or I will take you out,” Charon supplies helpfully.

Gobbie looks _scared._

“Just hang out by the bomb for a few minutes,” she says softly, and gives him her best smile. “It’ll be okay, Gobbie. I promise.”

“Okay,” he says quietly. He slips out with only a quick backwards glance and Charon locks the door behind him.

Lucky sets to work.

 

**********

 

“ _Mr. Moriarty_.”

Someone’s speaking to him, but there’s no one there.

“ _Colin Moriarty._ ”

Mr. Colin Moriarty. That's his name. He's sure of it. He would know his own name, right?

“Yeah?”, he answers, confused, looking up at the ceiling, trying to find the source of the voice. It’s so graceful, all ‘honey’s’ and ‘darling’s’, but even so soft, it's not one to be ignored. It is a voice of something fey and capricious from the dark woods of his childhood legends. One that grants wishes and takes everything you have in payment. One so beautiful you give everything anyway just to hear it speak.

“ _You have important business to take care of, Mr. Moriarty. Caps are at stake, thousands upon thousands of caps, and only you can retrieve them._ ”

“Thousands,” he repeats. He’s not sure where these caps are, but he’s got to get to them. He just has to.

“ _They are in Paradise Falls, Mr. Moriarty. You must retrieve them. It is important._ ”

“Yes. Important.” The way the voice says ‘important’, so urgent and earnest, it’s suddenly so true, and he has never known anything so clearly in all his life. And ‘Paradise Falls’. It sounds like an oasis, somewhere so perfect for mountains on mountains of caps to live.

“We _ar this necklace.It will be your passage into the city._ ”

“So shiny _,_ ” he says as he fastens it around his neck with a sharp click.

“ _Yes. Shiny, like the caps. Write this note; it is also important. Then you must leave right away."_

“Of course. The note.” He scribbles the words so smoothly whispered in his ear and signs letters of his name quickly, eager to be gone.

_“Put on your coat. Button it up all the way. The Wasteland is dangerous, but it will keep you safe.”_

_“_ Coat. Button it up. _”_ It’s hot and scratchy as he buttons it to his chin, but the Wasteland is dangerous.

 _“Good, Mr. Moriarty,”_ the voice praises and it sends a flash of something delightfully warm through his gut. _“But you must hurry. Do not stop until you reach the city. Go. Now._ ”

The last two words are so bright, so blindingly bright, and Jesus fucking Christ in heaven, he has to _go._

“I’m in a hurry,” he says. “Goodbye.”

He bursts through the door, running down the metal ramps, knocking into Simms. He needs to get there quickly, and this bastard is in the way. Simms is _always_ in the way.

“Colin? Are you alright?”

He tries to think, but his head is too fuzzy and the question isn’t important. “Yeah, I’ve got business to take care of.”

Simms doesn’t move.

"Get out of my way, cunt! Can't you see I'm in a hurry? ”

Simms narrows his eyes but steps aside, and Moriarty could weep with relief that he won’t be delayed with more questions.

That shit-stupid ghoul is standing in the puddle again. “Boss?” he calls out in that ugly, grating voice of his, nothing like the silver voice. “Where’re you going?”

“Away. Take care of the bar while I'm gone, you stupid fuck!”

Moriarty almost dances in place as the doors to Megaton open. People look at him as if he might be mad, and he wants to yell at them about the caps. But they just don’t understand.

He’s got to hurry.

It’s important.

 

**********

 

Lucky had read the manual about the Mesmetron. It was crazy, and the science behind it looked more like science fiction, but she had gritted her teeth and shot Moriarty right in the side of the head.

The manual had said something about ‘cross-chatter’ and ‘cyclical dissonance’ and ‘cerebral demise’, which didn’t sound very encouraging, but Moriarty’s face had gone slack and stupid, and he’d listened as if God himself was giving him a brand new set of the Ten Commandments.

She’d dosed him a few times with the invisible brain-addling waves, and he had toddled off into the Wasteland like a kid excited for their first day of school.

Here and now, Lucky wonders if she should just shoot the poor bastard and be done with it. But as she watches him through the scope of the sniper rifle, there’s just something lovely in the way he stumbles across the uneven ground, like a mad brahmin with a broken leg.

“Are you going to shoot him, Mistress?”

The way he says it, almost gleeful, makes Lucky smile a smile that only comes out when she fires her gun. Some people grimace, or have that stone cold killer face, but she can’t help but grin that crazy little grin.

“Dunno. Gobbie told me the slavers made him walk with no food or water for six days. They beat the shit out of him the whole time. Seems like he’s getting off lucky, ya know?”

“Yes. He is.”

“Well, I don't think he's walking fast enough, do you?”

“No. Definitely not.”

Lucky has been pressing Moriarty north unerringly. Once the Mesmetron had worn off, he had tried to turn tail and run back to Megaton, but Lucky and Charon had herded him with well-placed .308 rounds, and after a few ill-advised bids for freedom, he had quickly gotten the picture. She could see his fear through the scope and if an emotion could have been a tactile sensation, she would have played in it like a big pile of leaves.

Sometime in the night, Moriarty had tried to slip away under the cover of darkness, but Lucky had just laughed. Night was _her_ time. She popped him in the leg and could hear his shrieks of pain bounce through the valley.

But she doesn’t get the chance to nudge him with a bullet again. He’s stumbling, leaving drops of blood in a trail behind him. A yip and a howl echo through the night, and Moriarty panics and takes off in a stilted run. A pack of wild dogs have scented the freshly let blood, and they are relentless.

“Let the Wasteland have him,” Charon suggests sagely and his advice is good.

As the dogs rip into soft flesh and Moriarty kicks and struggles and screams as they tear him apart, Lucky feels nothing like regret or disgust.

Just joy, effervescent and bubbling.

She takes her eye off the scope and looks at Charon. Really _looks_ at him, and he’s lying there next to her, all long and lean with dust on his elbows, looking through the scope of his own hunting rifle at the carnage below.

Lucky wants to roll him over in the dirt and find out just exactly what he likes.

She feels no guilt as the dogs settle down to eat, snapping at each other the way they do to assert dominance and reaffirm their places in the pack. But they’re not snarling over a molerat, they’re snarling over the choicest bits of Moriarty.

There’s no remorse. No songs of blood or blank-star stories. No cups of poison with slithering things. No feeling that she has done something wrong, that she has sinned yet again. There's just a heat pooling in her belly when she follows the swell of muscle in Charon’s shoulders and the way his big hands grip his rifle.

Lucky briefly wonders if something really is wrong with her.

“Charon?”

“Yes?”

“Am I a monster?”

His eyes are blue, but they're not scared. And there’s something there, but she doesn’t understand it. His answer is swift and decisive, as if he has known the answer his whole life.

“No.”

 

**********

 

“Tell me again.”

Lucas Simms is as confused as a human possibly could be. Moriarty hadn’t gone through the gates of Megaton in over fifteen years, and he picks three in the damn morning to run out like his ass was on fire. The bar had been rowdy, and somebody banged on Lucas’s door, babbling about a fight between a giant ghoul, a tiny girl, and Jericho, but by the time he had gotten there, all three of them were drinking together just as thick as thieves. Some cuts and blood, but nothing to suggest they were going to maul each other.

It had been impossible to sleep after that, so he had roamed the city, making sure whatever tenuous, drunken peace they had made held.

Here in his office, Nova crosses her legs, skirt riding up. He doesn’t hold with the work she does, but to each their own. It doesn’t hurt anything except men’s finances and their marriages.

“Well, I was upstairs with a client. Didn't hear a thing. But, to be honest, I was kinda busy. Anyway, all I know is, when I came downstairs, he's not there.”

Nova had always been pretty, but in that lazy, smoldery way that would drive a man nuts. Lucas remembers the first time she came here. Busted up, strung out on chems, and broke. Never said where she came from, but Lucas thinks she was a raider once. Probably not long, but long enough to give her an edge most women don't have. She had cleaned up good, kicked the chems. Until Moriarty had got a hold of her, anyway.

Now she looks about the same as when she started.

“Right,” he says, pinching his nose. “Send Gob in, please.”

Nova gives him a lopsided smile - owing to the fact she's got a nasty fat lip - and drunkenly wanders out, bouncing against the doorframe and almost falling on her ass down the stairs. High as a kite at 8 o'clock in the morning.

Things are getting ridiculous around here. But maybe they always had been and this is just the new normal. Or maybe he’s finally seeing things for what they are.

Gob comes in, nervous and twitchy, but he's always like that. Lucas feels sorry for him. He doesn't have anything against ghouls. They're people too, he figures. But, the others in Megaton are afraid of them, and as mayor, he does have to listen to his constituents at least a little bit.

“Sit.”

Gob does, almost cowering.

“Tell me what happened.”

“Um, it was busy. Everyone finally left. So, I got all my cleaning done, and I was really sore-”

“Sore?”

“Well, yeah. Some broken ribs, and my fingers…” Gob holds up a hand with three of the fingers wrapped in strips of cloth. “Nova set them for me.”

“Then what?”

“All my work was done, and Moriarty was counting the till. He doesn't like it when I interrupt him. So I went to stand in the Pool for a little bit. Heal up so I could work the next day.”

“Did you see him?”

“Yeah. But I don't understand it. He ran past me. Said he was going away, and to take care of the bar. He wouldn’t tell me why.”

“Damnit.”

“Um, can I go now? I’m supposed to open the bar soon, and when he comes back...”

Lucas waves a distracted hand at him, caught up in his own thoughts.

 

**********

 

Lucas taps the 10mm pistol sitting on his desk with the two silver keys on a chain, not believing what he’s hearing.

“Dead?”

The girl doesn't look sad, exactly. Then again, the only thing anyone in this town would miss of Colin Moriarty is his booze and Nova.

“Yeah. Charon and I,” she jerks her thumb at the tall ghoul standing behind her like a living, breathing nightmare, “were north of Arefu. You know, where Lucy West is from?”

“I know it.”

“Well, we kinda stumbled on him. A pack of dogs, I think. They, um, _ate_ him. But I thought I recognized the coat. And then I found the gun. It’s got his name scratched on the barrel. So I grabbed what I could and brought it back.”

“What do you think happened?”

“Who knows? They tore everything up pretty bad. Couldn’t tell up from down. Why would he leave town, though?”

“I dunno, kid. I guess I'll have to go through his personal effects. Try to figure out what to do.”

“Does this mean the saloon will close?”

“Probably.”

“That’s too bad. Nova will be okay. She's tough. But poor Gobbie. Bartending is all he knows,” she says, gray eyes big and sad.

“Anything else you can remember?”

“No, but if I think of anything, I'll give you a shout.”

Lucas looks hard at the big ghoul, who in the whole three months he’s been in town, only spoke to him once, and had told him ‘I don’t answer to you, human.’ Like being a ghoul was somehow better, and that he didn’t give a flying rat’s ass about anybody’s say-so except his boss’s. And she is his boss. Anybody can see that, but there's something _off_ about him. Lucas can’t put his finger on it, but it’s there, lying underneath just deep enough that he can’t get to it. But the ghoul had behaved himself so far, and Lucas supposes he can’t ask for much more.

“Charon, right?”

The ghoul nods but doesn't say a word, and those weird eyes all ghouls seem to have don't say a damn thing either.

“Anything you want to share?”

The quickest of glances in his boss’s direction, but she's not letting anything slip.

“No.”

“No? Nothing else you remember?”

“No.”

Jesus. He’d have more luck getting blood out of a stone with a feather duster.

The girl looks at him, polite and docile, but stands to leave like nobody could stop her. “Anything else I find out, you'll be the first to know, okay?”

She walks away, and Lucas knows she's a killer. The ghoul trailing her is, too. It's in their eyes, in the way they move - him powerful like a yao guai and her lithe as a snake. They probably met Moriarty on the road, slit his throat, and let the dogs eat him.

But Lucas knows everyone in this town owes her their lives. That detonator had been the real deal. Moira had taken one look at it and went paler than he thought a person ever could.

And not just that.

Lucas owes her his life a second time after Burke’s little stunt. He had come home alive when he shouldn’t have, and had picked up Harden and just _squeezed_ , drinking him in as if he might not see him again, because he almost hadn’t.

“What’s a matter, Dad?” he'd asked, because kids always know when their world’s off-kilter.

“Nothin’, buddy. Just happy to see you.”

No, he owes her more than his life. And him not questioning her about a murder he could never possibly prove she committed doesn’t even come close to wiping the slate clean.

 

**********

 

Something has been eating at Lucky ever since she had traced her fingertips around the bloody thumbprint on Charon’s contract, ever since he had held it in his own hand and had given it back.

_‘If someone had taken it from you…’_

And the thumb-eyed man had tried to take it from her. Tried to take her paper and all the promises it contained.

Other people had their own paper-promises. Not quite like hers, but the chain with the two silver keys had been Moriarty’s whole life. One key protected his life savings of caps and chems in the file cabinet that Jericho had drunkenly told her about, and the other safeguarded the dresser that held the deed to the bar.

Which Lucky had him sign over to Gobbie in the untimely event of his death, and in his own, unforced and completely natural handwriting, no less.

But the way she had plucked it from his ripped-up throat as easily as picking an overripe fruit reminded her that some things could be taken from her just as easily.

“Charon?”

“Yes?”

“How long do you want to stay with me?”

“I would follow you for as long as you wish.”

She taps her chin in thought. They're sitting on the couch together, her trying to read and failing, him cleaning his gun.

“So, say I had your contract till I die of old age. Would you get bored of me?”

He snorts at her. “Boredom is the least of my concerns.”

“Well, okay. I’m going back to DC tomorrow. Do you want to come with?”

Charon looks at her as if such a question is idiotic.

“Yes.”

She smiles, because she thinks he means it.

 


	17. All Velvet and No Iron

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration provided by:
> 
> The Light She Brings - Joep Beving  
> Sub Piano - Max Richter  
> Fuel to Fire - Agnes Obel  
> Comptine d'un autre ete - Yann Tiersen  
> Shortline - RY X  
> You're So Very Far Away - Clem Leek  
> Breaking Down - Clem Leek  
> Rays of Hope - Oneke  
> Reconfiguration - Other Lives  
> In Dreams - Ben Howard
> 
> Only - RY X

His Mistress is…

Charon does not really know what she is. Not _ill_ exactly, but not well either. He knew a Vault dweller might have difficulty adjusting to a life above ground, but most of the time, she appears to be doing phenomenally well. Thriving instead of just surviving, creating and building instead of simply struggling to exist.

And she is blindingly intelligent.

Her capacity to learn, to discover all the secrets the Wasteland has and bend them to her needs and wants, is truly unique. When she encounters an obstacle or discomfort, she does not simply shrug and give it up as a lost cause. Instead, she chooses to be breathtakingly stubborn.

Dirty fingernails? Make some soap.

Running low on landmines? Build a bomb out of a lunchbox.

Grenades just not up to snuff? Stuff some tin-cans with some drain cleaner and glowing soda, and  _viola!_  an incendiary device that could level a small shed.

Someone has injured your employee? Shoot up with enough Psycho to put down a grown man and pluck out the eyes of your enemy, all while singing like a lark.

She had sang words to the man on the ground with her ‘thumbs in his eyes’, about keeping her ‘paper-promises’ and how payment was due for trying to take it from her, for harming what was hers. Not, Charon thinks, because she is attached to the contract itself, but because she has become attached to _him._ Not as an employee or piece of property, but as something that is important to her for its own merits.

Her friend.

_“He hurt you. I want his blood.”_

She was beautiful, face anointed with three perfectly symmetrical lines - one down each eye and cheekbone and another from forehead to chin - she looked like a demon or an angel, maybe a mix of the two, something both divine and deadly. A merciless, pitiless goddess of war and judgement, perched on the chest of what might pass for a man, and her thumbs _were_ in his eyes, dug in deep enough that he would never see again.

_‘But I want his blood. Can I please have it?’_

So heartbreakingly earnest, wanting vengeance and retribution so badly but willing to let him tell her no. Willing to fight through the haze of drugs and bloodlust to wait and be patient, simply because he asked her to.

It was the first time Charon has truly been afraid of an employer.

_‘The bees are in his mouth now. They’ll sing his songs to you.’_

And she had been right. Charon now has names and locations, people and places that he would empty of blood and burn to ash if she will let him. And he thinks she will. She had sung her words in a voice that said she couldn’t be certain anyone but herself could hear them, singing about a red haze and violins and how the world had been filled with it, how she wanted more of it until they all had paid and their ‘songs’ of blood became hers.

But what was most interesting is that none of her phrases had sounded insane to him. Oh, he knew they should. He knew they should sound crazy, that he should instantly recognize them as some sort of deep-seated mental problem that was new enough to have no name, but he had _understood._ Each word was stunningly astute and starkly honest, poetic in a way to put the authors of her books to shame.

Charon sees the same red-haze, knows how it tinges everything when the endorphins flow, can bend and shape it in a way he thinks she is only starting to learn. He had just never assigned words to it, had never thought to sing of it before.

Charon sighs because he now understands that they are _both_ probably mad.

 

**********

 

His Mistress is packing in that obsessive-compulsive little way he has grown used to - appropriate numbers of appropriate items, all squirrelled away in their appropriate places until they are arranged just so.

She has sent him (asked, of course, never demanded) to Moira’s with the request to buy her out of 5.56 and shotgun shells or anything else that caught his eye. Had given him a bag of her own caps to ‘snag’ himself anything he found ‘pretty’.

He gets to the shop at three in the afternoon on a Thursday, and almost smashes his face into the steel door because it is locked tight when it should be open.

He knocks.

And knocks again.

Charon has been set with a task, one that he will perform come hell or high water simply because she had been sure to phrase it in such a way that would allow him to actually say no.

“Moira Brown?” he asks loudly through the door with four loud knocks that get progressively more violent. Could she be injured? Blown up by one of her ridiculous experiments? How on earth had Rome allowed her to be harmed? Was it not his function to protect his employer? Even when she made things explode at inopportune times and stupidly attempted to tame molerats and centaurs?

He takes a step back to kick the door down. Even a steel door can be breached with the proper amount of force in precisely the correct place-

The door is unlocked and cracked just enough for Rome’s face to peek out.

“Come back in an hour,” he says, breathing a bit harder than one should have to when the entirety of their job is to become part of the wall.

‘But...shotgun shells-”

 _“One. Hour!”_ Rome hisses at him, eyes darting wildly like the shop is a cage and he might be trapped in it.

“Two!”, Moira’s voice floats lazily from somewhere inside.

Rome slides a hand over his face and looks both defeated and exhausted. “Jesus fuck. Two then.”

And with that, the steel door is slammed shut in Charon’s face.

 

**********

 

“I apologize.”

His Mistress’s head swings up. “For what?”

Charon almost does not want to say. This is the first time she has asked something of him and he had failed.

“You didn’t beat up Leo Stahl, did you?! I know he stares at me like a fucking letch, but he's harmless. I think. I mean, I'm pretty sure. He is kinda creepy though, huh. If his eyes were his hands, I’d be walking around town naked most of the time.”

She makes a face like she has accidentally eaten something awful and ‘blech’ noises very much like the dog when it actually has eaten something awful.

“I did not harm Leo Stahl.” But now Charon sure as hell wants to. In the space of a few seconds, he has already planned three or four techniques of intimidation that he prefers to deploy as soon as possible.

“So what happened? You look worried.”

“I failed to purchase your ammunition. The shop was closed.”

“Closed?”

“Yes.”

“Neither of them even let you in?”

“No. Moira Brown did not come to the door, but I believe she is unharmed. Rome appeared...frightened. And very tired. He demanded I leave and come back in two hours - why are you laughing?”

And she is, almost as hard as she had when the scrawny blonde had accosted her with an unloaded shotgun.

“Oh, Christ in heaven. I told him. I _told_ him. He didn't listen. Oh, _shit_ this is good. _So_ good.”

Charon is confused and must look it.

“They're um...together.”

“Together.”

“Yeah. The hippity-hop.”

“What?"

“You know, the hippity-hop. The no-pants-dance. The boudoir bossa nova. The forbidden fox-trot."

“Mistress-”

She is snorting again, trying to keep her giggles in, but it must be taking heroic effort because her eyes are starting to water.

"The horizontal hula. The mattress mambo. The bedtime boogie. The parallel - _hoo_ - polka. 

“Please stop.”

She is laughing again, head in her hands and shoulders shaking.

“You’re bashful!” More gasps and snorts. “That’s just adorable!”

“I am not _adorable.”_

She giggles like she definitely does not believe him.

“ _Adorable!”_ she announces imperiously, but the effect is ruined by one particularly strangled giggle as she tries to swallow it down. “Either way, I’m pretty sure Moira might be more than he bargained for.”

Many pieces of a tangled puzzle are straightened. The way Rome had looked at Moira, how he had spoken soft to her, had followed her with his eyes, had angled his body towards her like he was a plant and she was his only sun.

“I see.”

“Yeah. He bit off more than he could, heh, chew…”

And then she's off again and she looks so _free_ when she laughs like this. Like the world could not possibly be rotten, or maybe because she is the only thing not rotten in it.

She laughs until she cannot breathe, and finally stops with an alarming snort and a few last giggle-sighs.

“You really are adorable, you know that?”

Charon did not know that, and is not quite sure how to feel about this new opinion of himself.

But as she sits there on the floor, barefoot and beautiful, smiling up at him with her white teeth and her eyes that somehow smile louder to say he is not a monster, Charon decides that this is as close to happy as he will ever get.

 

**********

 

They hike together to DC, back to Our Lady Hope, and Charon can only wonder at it. Had they not cleared it out? She had left a cache of things in a nondescript metal box that was as good a hiding spot as one could hope for. Perhaps they are going to retrieve her treasures. Before, he had found her pack-rat tendencies simply irritating, but now he understands that for as soft and spoiled as he had first thought her, she is not independently wealthy. If scavving is what keeps his stomach full and shotgun loaded, Charon can certainly see the utility of that.

But her gears and cogs are whirring fast enough to make sparks and he hesitates to ask, but cannot help it.

“Why are we going back to Our Lady Hope?”

She looks at him with her shiny eyes in the dark and they blink once.

“I think it’s got something we need.”

_We._

What could Charon possibly need that she has not already given him? His new armor fits like a second skin, a vast improvement over his old set. His pockets rattle with stimpaks and he is hard pressed to find space for any more shotgun shells. His shotgun is in peak condition after her little fingers had repaired it almost as perfectly as when it had come off the assembly line - better, in fact, after she had given him parts to make the modifications he had his eye on for years.

But she moves, and quickly. The way is easy, and not much has returned to the tunnels. When they arrive, she looks at the building appraisingly.

“I need in the basement.”

Unless she blows a hole in the ground floor, that will not be possible. But she is an impossibility all by herself and prepares to do just that.

She takes some landmines and one of the explosive bottlecap creations that she likes to croon over, and strings them together like a necklace of destruction. Quick fingers do things to wires and switches that are surely _not_ in the manufacturer’s specifications, and she arranges them in a circle just so.

And then she stomps her tiny boot once on the floor and flees, grabbing Charon’s wrist and pulling him with her.

The blast is intense as he knocks them both to the ground and instinctively covers her small body with his own, and neither are injured.

“You're really big,” she says from underneath him.

He almost jumps off her, but she has a hold of his chest piece with both hands. His hips are on top of hers, bracketed between each of her legs, and she is looking up into his face with a strange light in her eyes.

If Charon did not know any better, he would say it is _want_ , and he freezes stock still because he is certain to be wrong.

She sighs and releases him and all he can do is get up and prowl the perimeter of the hole she has created, both in the floor and in his chest.

“Beautiful,” she breathes, peering down into the new portal to untold stories below. Before he can grab her, she has scrambled down the ledge and jumped into what is, for all he knows, a bottomless pit.

“It's alright,” she calls softly up to him. “Nothing down here.”

So he follows, absorbing the impact with a bend of his knees. It is dark as pitch, and he can barely see. His Mistress, however, seems to have little difficulty.

“Stay close,” she warns. “Can you see okay?”

Charon grumbles a no.

“Just hang on to me. I'd turn on my Pip-Boy light, but then I’ll be blind, too.”

So he grabs her by the belt and follows. He does not like this. There could be anything down here. But as his eyes slowly adjust, he can see they have dropped into some kind of medical center.

“It’s _untouched_ ,” she whispers reverently. “I think the stairs caved in when the bombs fell.”

“What are you looking for?”

“This,” she says, hacking a terminal that turns on red-tinged emergency lighting and opens a door marked ‘Surgery’.

Charon does _not_ like the look of this place. His fingertips prickle as the thin, centuries-old air still holds traces of antiseptic and something metallic and wrong. It stirs memories, not of the blonde woman, but flashes of his early training, things both old and cleverly filed away.

 

_Gloved hands, trays of instruments, blue paper drapes, blood-splashed floors, leather straps on his wrists._

_Mask on his face, tin-air across his tongue, filling his lungs-_

_‘Count backwards from ten, Lieutenant.’_

_Ten, nine, eight, seven, six - Rachael-I’m-so-sorry - five, four..._

  


“This place is not safe,” he says, and even he can hear the note of panic in his own voice, both because this place is dangerous and he knows no Rachael. But that is a lie.

Charon has a name to put to the woman with the blonde hair and the heart-shaped face.

“I know,” his Mistress says simply. “But I have to.”

“You do not _have_ to do anything.”

She smiles at him, pearl teeth and eyes flashing in the dark. “Do you want to stay here?”

“Yes, but where you go, I shall follow.”

“Alright.”

He grabs her by the belt, pulling her to him. As much as this place makes him want to scream at the top of his lungs and toss grenade after grenade through the door to kill whatever terrible thing is making him feel like this, he will follow, but refuses to let her out of his sight.

“What’s wrong?” she asks as he pulls her back from a shadow he does not like the look of.

“Memories,” he says succinctly.

She does not pick or press or even look at him as if he might be crazy.

“I wondered.” She pets the underside of his wrist with her thumb, soft little back-and-forth strokes, like you might calm a child. “It’s okay,” she says, “I’m right here.”

Her belt in one hand and shotgun in the other, he lets her explore, only breathing a bit easier when they discover there is truly nothing down here.

She picks up objects that he can only dream of uses for. Opening a metal cabinet with a rolling door, she takes in a sharp breath, and so jittery, Charon almost shoots it.

“This. This is what I'm looking for.”

The large cabinet is filled with white plastic packages of every shape and size. His Mistress runs her finger along one thoughtfully, but spins around and her eyes pierce through him like a shotgun blast.

“This is your last chance. If you want me to take you somewhere, to anyone, I need to know now.”

“No,” he answers, and with certainty. If she stays as she is, he would prefer to follow her until one of them is dead.

“You're absolutely sure?”

“Yes.”

“Well, alright. If you change your mind, it's okay. It'll hurt like a sonofabitch, but I'd do it for you.”

 

***********

 

Charon is not sure what she means until they return back to her Megaton home with all the medical supplies they could carry. She puts them all away in lunchboxes, carefully organizing them with some lawless system that Charon does not bother to attempt deciphering.

And then she cleans. She attacks what little dirt the robot has missed with a bucket of water stiffly mixed with Abraxo, a worn scrub brush, and the same vicious totality she uses to destroy her enemies.

And what is dirt to her but another enemy?

“Do you need help?” he finally asks as she stands on her tiptoes to reach the top of an exposed beam.

She smiles at him, a small one stuffed with more things he does not understand.

“If you want.”

Truth be told, Charon would rather not. Instead, he would rather sit right here on the couch with his feet kicked up on the coffee table and watch her scrub - watch the lean muscle slide smooth under her skin and her damp shirt cling as she presses her curves and lines along the wall to reach up as far as she can.

Watch and wonder if her back would arch like that if he took her from behind, a hip in one hand, her corkscrew curls wound tight in the fist of the other, pulling a little but not too hard, just enough so the graceful line of her throat was bared for him to test with his teeth as he drove himself into her until she was flush against the wall-

He knows he should not think about her like this. It is dangerous. But she is beautiful, so bright and bold. And his errant thoughts come when they want and do what they will, all rationality be damned. And maybe he is just tired, too tired to keep burying these dangerous thoughts that pile up one after the other.

So he sighs and takes the scrub brush from her and gets the bits she is too short for.

Charon feels her eyes on him, and for one fleeting, ridiculous moment, wonders if she watches him with similar thoughts.

 

**********

 

“You told me if someone got a hold of your contract and ordered you to kill me, you'd do it. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“Even if you really didn't want to.”

“The contract would force me to obey my new employer in all things.”

She looks so serious sitting next to him on the couch, knees drawn up into her chest, staring at her bare toes as she wiggles them.

In the house, she always ran around barefoot. Not even socks lasted long when she was in a place she could truly relax. And the house is _clean_ , the sharp smell of Abraxo still hanging in the air. She is clean too, having scrubbed away her exertions in the cast iron bath tub.

“Has that ever happened before? The contract getting taken?”

Shamefully, it had. One employer had demanded he ‘leave him the fuck alone’. Charon had gone out to patrol the perimeter, and a supposed friend had taken it from his employer by force. Charon had not been too wounded when he was immediately commanded to kill his old employer. And the new employer ended up being the one smashed by the Corvega, anyway.

“Yes.”

“The contract needs to stay on my person at all times, right?”

“I can hold it in trust for a short while if you are incapacitated, but yes, you must possess the document.”

“And you can’t think of anyone else you’d rather give it to?”

“No.”

Charon does not understand why she keeps asking these same questions over and over. Perhaps she wants to be rid of him. He does not blame her. She has been seriously wounded twice already while under his protection, and he himself had offered her violence the same amount of times. How useless he is. While she seems to think him something important, her judgement leaves much to be desired.

But his chest still seizes at the thought of having his contract in someone else’s hands.

“Alright,” she says, smiling up into his face.

She sits on the stool at the workbench, the one too tall for her feet to touch the ground. Kicking her legs, she busies herself with lunchboxes, and Charon supposes she has dropped the conversation and moved on to making more bottlecap mines.

She tinkers and toodles and sings off-key nonsense about ‘meeses big as mooses’ and ‘gooses full of juices’ ( _nom, nom, nom_ ). She boils a pot of water. She washes her hands. She does all the strange things that have become commonplace when she works, and he relaxes and picks up reading his book where he had left the bookmark she had given him. It is a large, thick book, but the words in it twist and turn, and he has been admiring the way the phrases flow across the pages. He had tried to dog-ear the page and she had growled at him almost as angrily as the time he had tried to be her shield.

“I'm gonna need your help, big guy.”

Charon looks up from his book. The blue drape on the workbench covered with every surgical supply known to man - suture kits, scalpels, spreaders, forceps - but it is his contract, folded up impossibly small and rolled into a cylinder the size of a fatly packed cigarette that sets his blood pounding in his ears. And the way her shirt is half off, the neck folded down just enough to cover her and another blue drape tucked into it, it brings the echoes of bad memories like the ones at Our Lady Hope.

“What are you doing?” he asks, so quiet she does not seem to hear.

“Come here and help me,” she says, scrubbing her hands.

He migrates warily to her side. She had given him a command. Not a sleepy, unconscious one, but one that means what she says. If she thinks she is going to cut him open in a misguided attempt to try to fix his brain herself, he will not allow it. The contract has some provisions for self defense, and just because they are not written down does not mean they do not exist. He will consider it physical violence and while it will not be on a level to invalidate the contract, he will restrain her until she is back in her right mind.

“I'm going to tell you to do some things, but you might not like it.”

She is right. Charon does not like the sound of that at all. It must show on his face, because she looks at him with the same look she had given him when he had told her about the memories at Our Lady Hope.

“I would never give you a command that would hurt you. You know that, right?”

He thinks he does, but he still does not like this. There are many ways to hurt a person, and only some of them are physical.

“Wash your hands like I'm doing. Really well, please.”

He does.

“Pick up your contract by the end with these tweezers.”

As he does as she commanded, she opens a white package in a strange motion, out and away from her so the cylindrical plastic tube that falls out touches nothing except the blue drape. She holds it delicately but firmly with two pairs of forceps. “Slide the paper in lengthwise. Try not to touch the plastic.”

He does, but cannot understand why she refuses to tell him what she is up to. Rolling the top and bottom closed, she tacks the ends with a few sutures. Carefully, she  works a length of hot and pliable surgical tubing over it from the boiling pot of water. As it cools, it shrinks around the plastic, leaving two stubs which she melts shut with a lighter.

His Mistress looks up into his face, big gray eyes even bigger for all their seriousness. “You mean a lot to me,” she says. “Did you know that?”

He did not know, and that she would say something like that makes him nervous. It smacks of drastic actions and desperation.

But when she picks up the scalpel and takes those odd stuttering breaths, the kind she does when she is bracing for pain, he reaches up to slap it out of her hand.

“Stop!” she almost yells, and all he can do is growl at her.

“Please follow my directions. Just for now, okay?”

He nods and she smiles, and with a rock steady hand, slices into the skin under her left collarbone, the meaty space where arm becomes torso.

Charon is almost choking that she would harm herself like this, but his Mistress grits her teeth and does not make a sound, slicing ever deeper.

“Please stop,” he manages, but she ignores him, blood running rivulets down the blue drape.

“Now listen,” she says, “take the spreaders, open up the incision, and hold it. Don’t let go until I tell you.”

His hands are shaking and he has more adrenaline pumping through his veins than a whole lifetime of battle could make. But he obeys.

And as he opens up the wound with the claw-like instrument, she lets out a sound in between a shriek and a whimper. But she has given him a command. Charon knows she has no Med-X in her system because her pupils are steady and focused, and she must feel every flayed nerve and muscle fiber.

She delicately takes the plastic cylinder that has his contract sealed inside between a new pair of forceps. “Aortic graft. High grade surgical plastic. They used it to replace diseased or burst vessels. Cracked your chest open like a nut to get in there. They even had a machine to stop your heart and pump your blood for you. Can’t do anything like that now, though,” she says, and he thinks she is trying to put him at ease with chatter. “It’s perfect. Sterile. Leakproof. Flexible. Won’t cause infection or leech anything out. Might not even show up on an x-ray.”

It is genius, that much is true. She will never have to worry about his contract being lost, stolen, or destroyed, and placed where it is, she would likely be dead before someone was smart enough to find it and take it from her.

While he hates that she would do this to herself, he hates even more that she does it for him. And she does do this for him, in her own strange way. ‘I would follow you for as long as you wish,’ he had clearly said, and he had meant it. She had taken each of his words to heart, and probably not just that phrase. But worst of all, he thinks that if he found someone he preferred over her, she would cut his contract out of her body just as willingly as she had cut herself to put it in.

His Mistress keeps her breaths as even as she can and only lets out a little hiss when she nestles the cylinder deep into her own flesh.

“You can let go now.”

He does, clicking the spreaders so they release, but the wound is still gaping open.

“Thanks, big guy. Think you can stitch me up? It's hard with one hand.”

“I will try,” he says quietly. She leans back and lets him work, explaining how to use the forceps to grip the thread instead of his fingers, how to stitch the muscle first and then the skin, how tie each knot, and the curved needle makes it easier than he would have thought. It pierces through her skin and muscle like a hot knife through butter, and what she informed him was ‘bio-absorbable thread’ pulls through smoothly.

Exactly thirty-two stitches later, she praises his work.

“Well, Nurse Charon, you deserve a promotion! Couldn’t have done a better job myself.”

He grumbles at her, caught in a strange place between admiration for her intelligence and anger at her for causing both of them pain, her physical and him mental.

“Could Moira Brown not have helped you?”

His Mistress snorts. “She can’t keep a secret to save her life. Now you're the only one who knows.”

It is unprecedented, but he feels a swell of pride that she would trust him with this. She has not commanded him to keep this secret, but he knows he would die before telling a soul.

“Do you need a stimpak?”

“Nah. It’s probably best to let this kind of thing heal up naturally. But I wouldn’t say no to half a hit of Med-X and a nap.”

 

**********

 

Things change after that.

It is subtle, and Charon does not understand it completely, does not understand how deep it all goes, is not even sure what the ‘it’ might actually be. But things become almost... comfortable. So he decides to take the ‘it’ and the things as they come, and that will have to be good enough.

And really, what other choice does he have? She is water to his stone, and while her kindness may not break him like two more centuries of cruelty might, it is only a matter of time before it wears down any resolve he has left to hate her.

So he focuses on the now, and it is easy. Thinking of the past is useless, and thinking of the future is just as dangerous as getting shot at or stepping on a landmine.

Charon has become a creature of the present out of necessity.

Without stimpaks, the shoulder seems to take forever to heal. But while it does, his Mistress lazes about the house, reading and eating and napping and tinkering and doing a glorious amount of nothing.

Charon does too, and is surprised to find the boredom not nearly as bad as the Ninth Circle. Her Megaton home is still a glorified shack, but it is does not seem that way with her there. She has made something of it, something filled with soft, comfortable, clean things. Not just a place to eat, sleep, and merely exist in. She had made a place one could actually live a life in. Her favorite pastime is reading, and he could almost laugh at the ridiculous positions she puts herself in to get comfortable.

She contorts herself into a ninety-degree angle on the couch, legs and bare feet pointed to the ceiling. A pant leg slips to her knee and she hastily tries to cover her spectacular scar, but it is a difficult thing to do when upside down.

“Sorry. That’s pretty ugly,” she says. She sounds _ashamed_ , and Charon is astonished.

As if any part of her could be ugly.

He puts her book in her fluttering hands and taking her ankle in one hand and calf in the other, he inspects her scar for himself. He handles it lightly, giving her every opportunity to flinch, but she is still in his hands, only looking up at him with her big eyes. But why would she flinch? She touches him all the time, thumb petting his wrist, hip in his leg. Fingers putting a bottlecap in his hand.

Kiss on his forehead.

The ankle bones are small and sharp, the skin thin enough to see the tendons move underneath. And it is unspeakably soft. He turns her leg this way and that, sliding his thumb just along the edge of flawless skin, not daring to touch the scar because while it may not be perfect like the rest, it is hers and hers alone.

A testament to her strength. To her resilience.

“No. It is not. Only a fool would think so.”

He grudgingly releases her leg and she smiles up at him, even upside down as she is, and opens her book and sprawls out like an exceptionally lazy cat. He sits beside her with his long legs on the coffee table, trying to read his own book, but the way her back is bent reminds him of other, more intimate situations where she could look like that.

Head thrown back and curls tangled on the pillow, his own head between her thighs and all the sounds she might make would be just for him, maybe she might even say his name-

“Is the blood not rushing to your head?” he asks instead.

“Kinda.” She shuffles and wiggles, and finally gives up that position for a new one.

With her head pillowed on Charon’s lap.

“Oh hell yes,” she says, burrowing into the couch and his thigh in a way that means she will likely not get up for another hour.

“This okay?”

He grunts a ‘yes’ at her because it is both terrible and more than ‘okay’.

It is calm in the absolute safety of this house. The door is locked. The walls of Megaton are thick. The only way they could be in danger is if someone dropped a second bomb, one that actually fulfilled its function instead of the dud outside. There is nothing to break the silence except the wuffling of the dog as it sleeps and dreams of killing things. Even the robot has powered down in its docking station after dusting for what had to be the five-hundredth time. They both read, him the book about a white whale and the madness of the man who chases it, and her a book about dogs. At least, the boy flanked by two dogs on the cover say so. This calm is a peace Charon allows himself to sink into, because he is sure he has never experienced one quite like it.

He knows that when she finishes her book, she will tell him all about it, give him snippets of what she has found and decided are important enough to keep close. Things she thinks he might like or may need to hear. And it is a strange feeling, to know someone who would give him things just to give them. Simply because she wants to.

And then she snaps the book shut with _violence_ , and she is crying.

A snuffling, snorting, snot-filled crying that makes his gut clench.

“Mistress, what is wrong?”

“Oh-my-god-Old-Dan-died!” she wails, throwing her arms over her face.

Charon has no idea what to do.

“Who is ‘Old Dan’?” he asks stupidly.

“Theykilledthe _puppy_!” she shrieks and as the word ‘puppy’ is yowled with absolute anguish, she rolls over and buries her face in his leg, sobs and tears coming thick and fast.

He pets her hair because it is the only thing he can think to do. She has gone mad again. Over what he can only deduce is a fictional dog. But the braid has come loose and her curls are soft in his fingers, so he pets and separates each one, and she does not pull away.

“That is...terrible,” he says by way of an apology for something he did not do.

“Poor Dan,” she sniffles, finally starting to get a hold of herself. “Such a good dog.”

Her own flesh-and-blood dog is whining at her, nosing under her arm to get her to pay attention to it.

“Just...like… _you_!” she hiccups and then she is off again, arm locked around the dog who looks, to Charon anyway, almost resigned.

“You're never leaving the house again!” she murmurs into the dog’s ruff. The dog wriggles out of her grasp and licks her face.

“Eew!” she says, tears turning to laughs, and Charon relaxes.

The dog lolls its tongue out at her and prances off to noisily drink water, splashing it all over the floor.

His Mistress is now sprawled out face down across his lap, and she gusts out a breath, going limp.

“Are you well?”

“Mmmhmm.”

“Are you going to finish your book?”

“Fuck no. That book was just _mean_ ,” she says, gingerly flipping over again. “You can still read yours though.”

“What will you do?”

“Maybe take a nap. Is that okay?”

Charon nods yes, because he can only think of a few things better than that.

She drifts off and he reads, but before she goes under, she murmurs sleepily, “S’okay if you want to touch my hair.”

It is not a command, not even a request. Simply her giving him permission to do what he likes.

_Whatever you want, whenever you want._

Charon holds his book with one hand and when he is sure she is asleep, winds curls around the fingers of his other.

By all rights, he should hate her. Should hate this small creature that rules his life with an iron fist gloved in velvet fingers like he had hated each and every employer before her, but finds he cannot. Maybe he is just too tired. Maybe it is just her.

Maybe because when it comes to him, her fist is all velvet and no iron at all.

The scar, the one his life lives under now, is almost completely healed. With the way her sleeveless tank top is twisted around her, it begs to be investigated. It is not large, and anyone who did not know what it hid would think it a trivial, field-stitched knife wound, the kind people walk around with dozens of. He hesitates, but the pull is too strong. She never said he was not allowed. And had she not been still under his hands when he inspected her other, larger scar? Tracing a fingertip around this new one, like she had traced reverently around his thumbprint of blood, he is pleased to find the plastic that holds his contract hardly raises the skin at all. She shivers in her sleep and sighs. A contented sigh, one that shouts of good dreams.

_I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand would turn against the wolfish world._

 

**********

 

His Mistress has gone out shopping, and behind the walls of Megaton with her rifle, the two knives hidden away in her armor, and the dog, he considers her safe enough.

That is not strange, her sneaking off or shooing him away. She tends to do that when she is scheming, usually coming back with something for him. Something she had built or bought or scavenged (and sometimes stolen, but only from ‘real fuck-knuckles’ who needed to be ‘taken down a peg’). And they are simple things, things not remotely useful to the fulfilment of his contract.

A pristine comic book not even she had read yet. A grey wool hat when he told her it does in fact still get cold in the winter season. A ridiculously rare bottle of Glenmorangie 25-year (225-year, now, he supposes) whiskey he is almost afraid to open.

Almost.

And some things he has never even heard of. Things so ridiculous he is sure they cannot be real and that she had simply dreamed them up herself.

Like these ‘slippers’, for instance.

Made of...honestly, Charon has no idea. Some kind of carpet, perhaps? Or dark red bathrobes stolen from the hotel they had shot their way through while rescuing that Reilly woman's people? He also wonders why she bothered. But he knows. She had growled at him to take off his ‘nasty-ass’ boots while inside the house, and he had growled right back that not everyone preferred to traipse around barefoot like a savage.

Whatever these ‘slippers’ are made of, they were useless, frivolous things that had no place in this world, and he had almost considered refusing to put them on, until she said, ‘Oh. Well, it's okay if you don’t like them,” in that soft little voice that meant she was disappointed.

So he had put them on with a half-hearted grumble, expecting to be simply more irritated, but good god, were they _soft._

And like his bed and his armor and a million other little things, here was yet another that she had given him with no other motive except to be sure he was _comfortable._

Charon is lounging on the couch now, feet in those ridiculous slippers (surely only to make her feel better and _not_ because they are mind-numbingly soft after being stuck in various pairs of steel-toed combat boots for the last two centuries), and drinking a glass of whiskey. It is the best he has ever had, even after rifling through all of his cabinets of memories - full of peat and honey that finished with something as indefinable as trying to catch smoke in your fingers.

So it is a bit of a shock when the front door slams open and a knot of people all try to get in at once. Charon has his shotgun drawn in less than a moment, but sees his Mistress tenaciously hanging onto something that appears to be trying to throw her into a wall. Simms and Gob bring up the rear, hands equally full.

“Goddamnit, Nova, stop kicking!”

‘Nova’, or whatever animal she had devolved into, lets out a wordless screech to rival the most feral of ghouls.

They haul the woman up the stairs and almost throw her into his Mistress’s room, shutting the door and Simms holds a boot against the bottom. Whatever is trapped inside flings itself at the door, kicking and scratching at it. His Mistress shoves a chair under the knob, and the door shakes like something is exploding against it.

“Jesus,” Simms says. His hat is askew, and he flexes his hand like someone had injured it. “She _bit_ me.”

“The fuck happened?!” His Mistress asks angrily, and the tone demands answers.

Gob delivers as he babbles. “I tried to get her to stop. Told her she didn’t have to do that work anymore. Said she could just pour drinks. She asked me if I was gonna get her Jet for free like Moriarty. I told her to quit that junk, but she wouldn't.  I couldn’t kick her out. I just couldn’t-”

“Gob!” his Mistress says with a snap of her fingers, and the ghoul’s attention is immediately on her face. “Why did she bite Simms?”

Gob swallows, but shock seems to make the words come out in a flood. “She had a client. New guy. Never seen him before. He wanted his money back. Said she was too high to be any fun. She told him to fuck off, but the words didn’t come out right. _So_ much Jet. He laughed at her, stabbed her with a syringe. She went _nuts._ ”

“She went more than nuts, Lucky,” Simms says seriously, trying and failing to ignore the screeching behind the door. “I mean, _Jesus._ She threw a chair at him. Broke a bottle of vodka over his head. When that didn’t kill him, she tried to rip his throat out with her teeth.”

The gears and cogs are working overtime, and she looks sick. “You guys, this is really bad. He jabbed her with Psycho. Only drug that’ll do something like that. She's high as fuck, now.” His Mistress sighs. “My poor room.”

Simms rubs at his face like he is positively exhausted. “Well, I don't have anywhere to put her. And with the way she is now, tossing her out the gates would be a death sentence. You two decide what you're gonna do and let me know.”

“You’re leaving?!” Gob asks.

“Hell yes, I'm leaving! I’ve hit my crazy-quota for today. Besides, I need to get this bite looked at. Human bites are worse than dog bites by a mile.”

Simms tips his hat and scurries out as her shrieks float out the door behind him.

“Can she stay here? Until she’s better?” Gob asks, so anxious and concerned he looks ill.

“Of course.”

Gob looks directly at Charon, made bold with worry and what appears to be a bit of wild desperation.

“What about him?” he asks, jabbing an accusing finger in Charon’s direction. “Will she be safe with _him_ around?”

It seems Gobtholomew knows more about Charon’s past sins than may be healthy for him.

Once upon a time, Gob may have had cause to worry, but that Charon would find the creature upstairs - who is currently so incensed it cannot even formulate words to screech - even remotely attractive is absolutely hilarious.

“I would not touch that _thing_ if you paid me.”

Gob bristles up, and Charon could almost be surprised at the way he looks like he may want to fight. But his Mistress is always the peacemaker.

“What he _means_ ,” she says, giving Charon a pointed glance that clearly demands he ‘behave’, “is that she’ll be safer here than anywhere else. Promise.”

Gob does not seem entirely convinced and he still eyes Charon suspiciously, looking him up and down as if trying to discern his true intentions.

Until he gets to the godforsaken slippers.

“Um, what’s on your feet?”

Charon crosses his arms and his storm of silence dares Gob to ask again. And his face, the one that frightens even the bravest and most foolhardy (excepting his Mistress, because she seems to fear nothing), says that if he does dare, the consequences will be dire.

“They look great,” Gob squeaks, and in an admirable show of good sense, flees for his life.

 

***********

 

And so, that is how the cinnamon-haired whore from the bar came to be locked securely in his Mistress’s bedroom.

Charon does not use the word ‘whore’ as an insult. It is simply a fact of life. He understands that soft, weak creatures must do whatever they can to survive. Not all people can have his Mistress’s sharp teeth, after all.

But this woman has some teeth of her own, insidious and needle-pointed. She had calmed enough not to bite and scratch, but now that the high is gone, only withdrawal is left. Like his Mistress had at Paradise Falls, she uses her body like a weapon, trying to wheedle drugs out of anyone she can get close to.

Even Charon is a target. She speaks to him through the thin wall as he tries to sleep, and she describes in detail all the things she could and would do for him if he would just slip her a dose of Jet. Just one.

“I’ll make it worth your while, big guy.”

And the way she says ‘big guy’ so much like his Mistress, he cannot help but paint images in his head of tangled limbs and heat and soft skin under his hands, but the skin is never pale. It is always that warm brown that has no name to describe it.

But then she says something that makes bile rise in his throat.

“Come on! When’s the last time you got some?”

The last time he had ‘got some’, neither of them had wanted it at all. She had been skinny and young and with dull hair. Had called him monster and was not wrong, but she was so soft-

Charon slams that box of memories shut so fast that if it would have been real, it would have caught his fingers in the lid.

“You are pathetic,” he tells her matter of factly, because it is true. Only the truly weak allow a mere chemical to ruin them so completely.

She hisses insults through the wall, loud enough to be clearly heard, but not loud enough for anyone downstairs to hear. And he has to give her credit, because even after two centuries, the ones she serves up still sting.

He stalks out of his room and closes the door behind him with enough force to rattle the walls. His Mistress scrambles up from the couch she had claimed as a bed, knife flipped out and searching for enemies.

“Whozhere?”

“I cannot sleep next to that...thing.”

“Who next to?” The knife is put away, but she is still stupid with sleep, so he is sure to put little spaces between his words so she understands.

“She will do anything to get what she wants.”

His Mistress peers at him, gears and cogs grinding into motion, but they are slow.

“ _Anything_ ,” he reiterates, crossing his arms and glowering.

“What happened?”

“She offered herself in exchange for drugs. I refused. We had...words.”

The thundercloud is absolutely _wrathful,_ and Charon wonders at it. It is the same dark look that means injury or death comes for someone.

“I’ll take care of it.”

Charon wonders if he had made a mistake. Perhaps he should not have said anything. He does not think his Mistress will murder the cinnamon-haired whore who is supposed to be somewhat of a friend, but the lightning that flashes in her eyes does not bode well for her health.

But it is too late now. She has stormed up the stairs, unlocked the door, and now she is talking. Charon cannot quite hear everything, but the things he does hear? He is not completely sure what to think about them.

The cinnamon-haired whore whines and wheedles, at least smart enough to know when she's met her match.

“You’d side with that thing instead-”

“You’re goddamn right, I will. He's the best person I've met in this shithole. So keep that nasty-bitch-tongue behind your teeth or I’ll let Simms toss your sorry ass out the gate and lock it behind you, get it?”

“But-”

“Did I stutter?” His Mistress’s voice is soft and dangerous now, and anyone in their right mind would tread very lightly.

“I don’t have to-”

“I said,” his Mistress spits out her words like bullets, “ _Do. You. Get. It_.”

“Yeah. I get it.”

“Good. Because you try that shit with him again? Hand to God, I’ll knock the freckles right off your fucking face.”

The cinnamon-haired whore must see that it is not an idle threat and wisely stays silent The door is shut and locked, and his Mistress steps lightly down the stairs.

“I’m sorry, big guy. You shouldn’t have had to deal with that.”

“It is no trouble.”

“Yeah, well, it still pisses me right off. If Gobbie didn’t like her so much, I’d kick her ass from here to Timbuktu.”

“I did not mean to cause problems.”

She looks at him, a thought dawning, but what it means he cannot tell.

“It’s only a problem if she pushed something you didn't want. If you wanted it, that’s...different. You can have what you want, you know.”

She is shy all of a sudden, and flees to his room to steal his bed so he does not have to sleep next to the cinnamon-haired whore.

It only dawns on him much later while he is lying on the couch and staring up at the ceiling that if he found someone he wanted, even for just an hour, she would let him and not say a word about it.

She does not understand that it is her he wants, and that is something he can never have.

 

**********

 

The days go by in the same order.

The cinnamon-haired whore does not say a word to Charon, but when he makes himself scarce, she turns the full force of her charms (such as they are, sweaty and smelling of vomit) on his Mistress.

She laughs in her face, and tells her she ‘doesn’t swing that way’.

Charon cooks because otherwise they would be forced to subsist on grilled meat, burnt dinner, and pre-packaged junk food. His Mistress brings up a plate to their guest and usually takes it back untouched.

It appears the cinnamon-haired whore is too ill to proposition anyone now. Their guest is quiet, eating bits of food and drinking her water, only to throw it up or sweat it out. She asks for Gob, and the tic-y, nervous ghoul is fetched, but the visit is short-lived.

She whispers in his ear, winding her body around him like a snake, but he finally shoves her away. Furious at being put off, she _shrieks_ ghoul-related insults that even Charon had not heard before, and Gob flees.

Charon does not blame him in the least.

She tries to escape, and seeing her route blocked by Charon, she throws herself at him, all punches and kicks, bared teeth and a face twisted with rage.

He wonders how anyone could have ever thought her beautiful.

His instincts tell him to destroy her, but his Mistress, for some reason unfathomable, has claimed this animal as her ward. Her kicks and punches merely sting, and instead of snapping her neck, Charon takes her by the arms, flings her back into the bed, and bars the door behind him.

Gob and his Mistress speak with heads bent together, him looking inconsolable and her tracing little circles between his shoulder blades.

“She's never said things like that to me. Never,” he says, and his voice shakes.

“Hey. Whatever’s in that room, it's not Nova. Trust me.”

“Can’t you do anything?”

“No. I can keep her fed and hydrated, but the drugs have to work themselves out. Addictol is okay, but she’ll just fall right off the wagon again.”

“I think toward the end, Moriarty was overdosing her. Sometimes, she couldn't even talk. She just sort of...sat there.”

His Mistress looks like she wishes she could resurrect Moriarty just to let him be eaten by wild dogs a second time, and Charon agrees. “Jet’s horrible. And that extra hit of Psycho didn’t do her any favors.”

“What can I do?”

“Maybe get the saloon ready for when she comes back. It’ll help if she's got a soft place to land. Simms handed it over to you, right?”

“Yeah. Said a deed's a deed. Stahl was pissed, but what Simms says goes.”

“Good.”

They are both quiet for a while, but the beast upstairs is not. Wails and screams of ‘fight me’ float down through the door and into the living room. Gob looks slightly ill.

“What if when she gets better, she doesn't want to quit...that kind of work. What should I do?”

His Mistress thinks for a while.

“Well, it's your bar now. You've got to decide if that's something you want in your place. If not, and she won't quit, you'll have to kick her out.”

“Yeah. I know. I guess we’ll figure it out or something.”

“It’ll be alright, Gobbie. One way or another.”

“Thanks a lot. I don't know what you did to Moriarty-”

“I didn't do anything,” his Mistress says sharply, eyes hard. “Just happened to find him dead. You’d do better to remember that.”

Gob looks at her, and nods his head solemnly. “Right. Okay. So, I gotta get back and make sure nobody ransacked the place...”

The ghoul leaves with more purpose than he came with, and Charon wonders if that is all a person needs sometimes.

 

**********

 

The animal upstairs is mostly back to a woman. The drugs are out of her system, and while she looks like death warmed over, she has stopped trying to sell herself to anything with two legs for pharmaceuticals.

Now she is just ‘dope-sick’, as his Mistress says.

His Mistress tells him about her. How she came here penniless, got mixed up with Moriarty. How she refused to tell anyone where she came from, either because she was afraid or ashamed.

Charon figured as soon as she was clean, she would leave, and quickly. But the cinnamon-haired whore stays for another week, and his Mistress does not seem the least bit inconvenienced. It appears she can forgive, but why his Mistress had chosen to forgive her rather than any of the other people she held such fantastic grudges against, Charon cannot fathom.

She comes out of her room more often, more wary animal than human, but she makes her own meals and exchanges comic books for new ones. She apparently cannot read and only likes the comic books for their.pictures, because the books that his Mistress loves so much remain untouched. Sometimes his Mistress will go up to her room and read one to her.

Charon lies in his bed and listens through the wall.

This book is about...no one, really. One person, he thinks. Someone talking about journeys, about people they meet and things they see and how it changes them.

Charon does not like this wall. It muffles her voice, takes too many notes out of it. How irritating that he has to be shut up in his room while his Mistress reads to that _animal_ instead of reading to him.

Well, this is his house, too. Had she not said as much? Why should he have to be stuck here?

He opens her door and shoos her out of the chair. His chair. Where he had sat for days and could only watch while his Mistress almost died. Her eyes crinkle at the corners like she wants to laugh, but she just curls up at the foot of the bed like a monster is not in her room, ridiculous slippered feet kicked up on the desk with its hands behind its head.

The cinnamon-haired whore looks at him suspiciously, but also appears to like being read to, so swallows down whatever nasty thing she had ready on her acid tongue.

  


_“From this hour I ordain myself loosed of limits and imaginary lines,_

_Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute,_

_Listening to others, and considering well what they say,_

_Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,_

_Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me._

_I inhale great draughts of space._

_The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine._

_I am larger, better than I thought,_

_I did not know I held so much goodness_

_All seems beautiful to me.”_

  


And it is.

  
  
**********

 

The cinnamon-haired whore is becoming more person-like, and chooses today to go her own way.

They hold conference together on the couch, and while Charon flees to his room, he can hear many tears and reassurances and snatches of conversation.

He tries not to listen, but the house is small and its walls are thin.

“I think I like him,” the cinnamon-haired whore confesses, and Charon thinks she is speaking about one of her clients. Surely one had to have become a favorite.

“ _Like_ -like?”

“Mmhmm.”

“For how long?”

“A while. He’s the only one that’s always been there for me. Is that weird?”

“Of course not! It's awesome!”

So, what should I do?”

“ _You_ are seriously asking _me._ ”

“I never had to think about this stuff before!”

“Huh. Be friends first, I guess. Otherwise, I don’t think he’ll take you seriously.”

“Glad I asked you. I would have done, well, not that. So, what’s it like?”

“What's what like?”

“You know…”

“Oh. No.”

“But I thought-”

“Oh, I would. But he doesn't want me like that. It's...complicated.”

His Mistress had obviously met someone, and from the tone of the conversation that he should _not_ be listening in on, it had been someone she had preferred. Charon cannot imagine the idiot of a man that would turn her away. But she still wants this idiot anyway, and Charon feels like kicking the door off its hinges and then tearing the house down around his ears.

_Jealousy._

And _that_ is an emotion he does not remember _ever_ experiencing. But he has no right to be jealous, so he packs that poisonous emotion into a cabinet along with every other silly thing he sometimes has the misfortune of feeling.

The cabinet is running out of room.

“Oh honey. It's only complicated if you make it complicated. Even I know that.”

“Thanks, I guess. Now, I think you have some apologies to make.”

“Yeah. This sucks.”

“It should. But it's a chance to be better.”

Boots clomp up the stairs and Charon knows they do not belong to his Mistress. She is never so loud.

There is a knock at his door and he opens it. The cinnamon-haired whore - Nova, he supposes now - is standing there. She does not flinch from the way he fills the doorway and glowers down at her, but has at least the good grace to look ashamed.

“I'm really sorry for everything,” she says, studying the floor, and for a wonder, she does seem truly regretful. “I said some fucked up stuff. I didn’t mean any of it.”

“I am not the ghoul you should apologize to.”

“I know. I'm on my way over now. I just...thanks, I guess. For not hurting me when I went at you.”

Charon had wanted to, but knew his Mistress would have been furious. And she would have been right. Whatever animal that had been in that room throwing itself against the door and shrieking like the very hounds of hell is not the woman standing in front of him now.

“She,” he nods downstairs where his Mistress is, “would have been...angry.”

Nova smiles a tired smile. “And nobody wants that.”

She stands there, toeing her boot into the floor, a picture of the awkwardness that is so much more pronounced in self-assured people because they have no practice with it. “Hey, I know I don’t have room to ask for favors, but…keep her safe, okay?”

“I protect her life with my life.”

It slips out before he can stop himself. He would normally nod or grunt or stand there like stone, but he finds he means what he says and not, he thinks, because the contract requires it of him.

Nova looks at him, and smiles a secret-smile, the one women have perfected so totally that no one could possibly find the answer unless they decide to reveal it.

“Good,” she says simply, and walks away.

 

**********

 

They visit Nova and Gob, and Charon is surprised to see the transformation of the bar.

Bottles of liquor are displayed neatly on the shelves, lights have been strung up to make the place brighter and less desperate, and it is _clean._

His Mistress has brought gifts she thinks the pair may have use for, and they are good gifts indeed.

To Gob she gives a tattered book and a sturdy baseball bat.

He looks at her as if she is crazy.

“You run this bar now?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“Then you gotta act like it. If you're not gonna hire a bouncer, you need to be ready to kick some ass.”

Gob picks it up off the bar and studies it. It is a nice bat. Not Charon’s weapon of choice, but it does have its uses. His Mistress grins as Nova wolf-whistles when he hefts its weight in his hands, tests it with an open-wristed circle, and gives it an experimental swing.

“It’s got lead in the end,” he notes, swinging it again.

“Yep. And don't be afraid to use it.”

Gob is not a small ghoul, not skinny like Snowflake or the other half a dozen disasters that make up the ranks of  Underworld. He has a deep chest with thick arms and simply by virtue being male, seems to have more than enough upper body strength to crack a skull, not to mention that wiry endurance that all ghouls are blessed with.

And the way he steps into the swing says he has had practice with this weapon, even if it was a lifetime ago.

“Be firm but fair,” his Mistress says as if teaching a lesson. “Someone insults you or Nova, you toss their ass right off the balcony. Make an example, and they won’t do it again. ”

“No hesitation,” Charon says, since advice is being imparted, and if anyone has experience being a bouncer, it is him. “No mercy.”

“Take no shit, but don’t start any either,” Nova says, and no one is more surprised than Gob when she wraps her arms around his waist from behind and squeezes. Charon is only slightly less shocked because he now understands that Gob may be the one Nova _like_ -likes.

“What's with the book?” Gob asks, trying to cover his confusion with words.

His Mistress flaps a hand as if the baseball bat was easily the better of the two gifts. “It's a just a book I found about booze. How to distill it, how to mix it into drinks.”

Gob definitely prefers the book to the bat and smiles shyly at her.

“And you, pretty lady,” his Mistress says, “I have a little something for you too.”

His Mistress presents her with a double barrel shotgun and what appears to be a hairbrush. Charon has no opinion on the hairbrush, but the well-maintained gun with its glossy, polished stock makes a fine gift. While lighter and less powerful than his own, it is still an excellent tool for intimidation, and if the need arises, crowd control. Nova’s eyes roam over it, and Charon thinks she is familiar with its operation.

“Thank you,” she says softly, setting her gifts on the bar top and taking his Mistress’s hands. “For everything.”

Their heads are bent together for a moment, words are whispered, and they both get teary-eyed over nothing.

Women are easily the strangest creatures on this planet and quite possibly beyond.

“Um, can you help me take down the sign?”

Charon almost jumps because Gob is asking him directly. No one ever speaks to him, and the words ‘Talk. To. Lucky.’ almost spill out, but he catches them in time. His Mistress is nothing like Ahzrukhal, and he refuses to treat her as such.

“Nova’s too short,” Gob says, looking like he wishes he did not have to ask. He is still frightened of Charon, that much is clear, and Charon is not sure if he should be pleased or ashamed.

Charon looks to his Mistress for a sign of how to proceed, but she pointedly ignores him, letting him make his own decision.

“Very well.”

 

**********

 

Gob is pulling at the metal letters of Moriarty’s name with both a vicious sort of gusto and a nice little hint of rage.

Charon thinks it sits well on him.

“Thanks,” Gob says, eyes on the wall, and Charon supposes he means not just his help with the sign.

“I did nothing.”

“Yeah, well, thanks anyway.”

The destruction of the sign continues, and it is harder work than Charon would have thought. The day is blisteringly hot, and the metal spelling out the name of - if Charon may borrow a more colorful phrase from his Mistress - a ‘shit-sack’ excuse for a human is firmly, almost stubbornly, affixed to the building.

It seems Moriarty is just as irritating in death as he was in life.

“So, um, don’t kill me or anything, but I've got to ask a question.”

Charon grunts his acquiescence, and as the ‘M’ in ‘Moriarty’s’ finally comes off the wall and onto the decking with a clang, Gob seems to grow bold.

“How did you get Lucky?”

At first, Charon thinks he means ‘lucky’, as in fortunate, but the way Gob is looking at him like Charon might hold arcane secrets to the great beyond, he finally understands Gob is asking how he came to be employed.

“She purchased my contract.”

“Right, but how did you get her to...like you?”

Like him. Lucky likes Charon _._ It is ridiculous.

“She does not _like_ me.”

Gob looks at him as if is the most pitiable creature on the face of the earth.

"If you say so.”

 

**********

 

When his Mistress chooses idleness as her chief pursuit, she chases it wholeheartedly.

The same can be said when she decides to go to war.

“I think I'm about as healed up as I'm gonna get,” she says, rotating her arm to its fullest range of motion. The movement is smooth as the muscle of her back and shoulder glide under her skin, and Charon agrees.

“We are going, then?”

“I was thinking so. How do you feel about hunting some raiders?”

His Mistress seems to hate raiders as much as slavers. She shows more kindness to the wild dogs and feral ghouls than she does to these humans.

“I would hunt with you.”

“Great. What do you think about Dogmeat?”

It is a hard decision. The dog is a formidable combatant, but if she had temporarily lost her mind over the death a fictional dog, Charon does not want to be within three square miles when she loses her real one.

“I think it should stay here.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Maybe Maggie can take care of him.”

“We will be gone for some time?”

“I think so. I caught Maggie crying under the armory yesterday.”

He is not sure what the tears of a little girl have to do with the length of their trek through the Wasteland.

“Oh. Sorry. Maggie’s family was killed by raiders. Billy, the dude with the eye patch? He takes care of her now. But she still misses her parents.”

His Mistress has a glint in her eye, the one that make her gray eyes steel. With skin as dark as hers, he had always thought it strange that her eyes had not been brown, but instead of odd, Charon now finds the effect striking.

Beautiful, if he is being honest with himself.

The glint means death and destruction, blood and chaos.

All for a little girl who cried.

 

**********

 

“Me?!”

“Why not you? Dogmeat likes you, see?”

It is true. The dog loves children. Even now, it has abandoned his Mistress and is sitting on the child’s feet, begging to be pet.

“Can I, Billy? Please?! I'll feed him three times a day, and keep his water bowl full, and play fetch and tag, and he can sleep on my bed-”

“Are you gonna clean up after him, too?” the one-eyed man named Billy asks skeptically.

The little girl crosses her arms and looks insulted. “Of course! That's _responsibility_ ,”  she says, rolling the difficult word out.

“Well, alright. I guess it's okay.”

The girl squeals, the dog barks, and they both race off to do whatever it is children and wildly happy dogs do.

His Mistress grins. “You couldn’t say no to her if you tried, could you?”

“Hell no. Dunno what's gonna happen when she starts dating.”

“Lock her in her room until she's thirty,” his Mistress says sagely.

 

**********

 

Charon and his Mistress leave town side by side. When not in combat, she prefers to be close to him, always within arm’s reach. He can only wonder at it. Every other employer had wanted to be as far away from him as possible, usually to their own detriment, but she is always touching him. Hand on his arm, fingers on his wrist, hip in his leg.

And after his unlikely conversation with Gob, the idea that those little fingers on his wrist may hold a different meaning is starting to coil in the back of his brain like a pest he is not confident he can eradicate.

But before they can pass through the gate, the ex-raider Jericho stops them, and Charon is pleased to see the man’s face is still one large, greenish-yellow bruise.

“Nova quit!” he announces angrily.

“Well, yeah,” his Mistress says, shrugging her shoulders as if saving a whore from a lifetime of drudgery was all in a day’s work.

Jericho’s face turns even more bruise colored from anger, and Charon tenses, more than amenable to destroying him like he had wanted to in the bar.

But his Mistress bumps her rounded hip into his leg, her signal to him that violence is not needed.

Yet.

“You still got any raider friends?”

Jericho is knocked off balance by her abrupt change in topic.

“What?!”

“You know, _friends._ People you'd rather not see dead.”

He looks at her as if she might be making a joke at his expense. “They can get fucked for all I care.”

She claps her little hands once and smiles a sunshine smile, the picture of happiness.

“Awesome!” she says, grabbing Charon’s wrist and heading for the gate.

“Where’re you going?!”

“We’re gonna go fuck shit up,” she says, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“What about Nova?!”

“What about her?”

“What about...I mean,” he splutters, so apoplectically angry that words are too difficult, “who’s gonna…”

His Mistress walks calmly away, but gives a vulgar motion with her free hand that describes in detail how he should take care of any needs he might have.

Charon laughs almost as hard as when she had tried to learn to swim.

 

**********

 

As with most assaults, his Mistress comes up with lovely plans. Charon considers himself more as a tool, a hammer to drive specific nails. Oh, he can work an open battlefield, make lightning fast decisions on the fly, but his Mistress, with her love of stealth and explosives, paints art with her tactics.

“Work smarter, not harder,” she had told him.

So they ‘case the place’, as she says, circling the encampment that is situated in a box canyon. One way in, one way out.

“This place is not safe,” he growls. At first, she had jumped when he had warned her. Now she just grins the grin with the sharp edges.

“Maybe it will be when we get done with it.”

At first he thinks her foolhardy, but he remembers the way she handles her rifle and how she can melt into shadow and feels marginally better about the endeavor.

And they are _very_ well supplied.

Barring a missile to the face or grenade-induced dismemberment, they have enough stimpaks between them to keep an entire army on its feet.

And the weaponry.

She had meticulously packed his pack with her own hands, and he does not mind because she had filled it with things worth carrying, tools of blood and war.

 _His_ things.

She herself had found a treasure using the prime number clues at the Museum of Technology and it is a gun perfectly suited to her. Charon has certainly not seen its equal.

And then she had tried to give it to him. Put it in his hands as happily as if she had searched the far-flung reaches of the earth and found it specifically for him. Charon inspected it and had found it beautiful in its very utility. The balance is phenomenal, the action remarkably smooth, and judging by its shape, it is apparently of Chinese make. While they made terrible pistols, their assault rifles are easily the best available in the Wasteland, and this is the most perfect of its kind.

He gently pushed it back to her because it is a weapon someone like his Mistress deserves.

Taking it with a mock frown, she miraculously found places in his armor to squirrel away three more stimpaks, intent on giving him something useful.

She does not realize she has given him more than enough.

 

**********

 

They strike at night, and her plans are fruitful.

Oh, they could bomb the place to oblivion and back with the Fatman, could rain down fire with Molotov cocktails and the new, high-yield Nuka-grenades she had created. Could use a missile launcher to destroy the power transformer that was all that stood between the raiders and their complete annihilation by the supermutant behemoth they had caged up like a pet.

But that simply would not do.

His Mistress had almost choked in anger at the electrified pens of what appeared to be slaves. And there were surely more in the underground caves that Jericho had drunkenly babbled about.

So they snipe to their heart’s content, using plastic bottles as throwaway silencers. Contrary to popular belief, even machine-milled silencers are not truly silent. There is still a substantial ‘ _pop’_ sound they give off, but it is certainly better than nothing. And paired with the normal night sounds of crackling fires, the stomping of the behemoth, it is more than enough. He takes this opportunity to give her a few lessons he himself had learned, albeit more gently than his own teachers had taught him. He had itched to correct her grip when they had hunted Moriarty, but it had not seemed the time. Too heated, too personal. But he agrees with her that they are now simply hunting human-shaped animals.

For being self-taught and learning on a BB gun, she is still efficient, intelligent enough to recognize some gaps in her education and compensate in new and creative ways.

“You stay in one position too long,” he tells her quietly.

“But this setup is perfect,” she whispers back.

“And it will become a trap when they find you. The glint off your scope, the trajectory of blood spatter, a muzzle flash - any of these announce your position. A sniper is a nomad,” he tells her sagely, because he _knows_. As he should. It is burned into his bones, after all.

“Always moving?”

“Precisely.”

“So how many shots is a nest good for?”

“There is no ‘nest’. Only dead people make nests. One spot, one shot. Even if you only move a few ten yards, you never shoot from the same place twice.”

She takes all his advice, snapping it up like she is hungry.

Finally, there are no more left alive outside. Dead bodies litter walkways and gang planks, roofs and campfire circles.

They search the buildings and murder everyone inside. She gives no quarter, no mercy, even to the two raiders she catches in a _very_ compromising position.

 _“Animals,”_ she spits as she shoots them where they sit on the bed, the woman shrieking and the man blitzed out of his mind on Jet.

“Yes,” Charon agrees.

“We’ve gotta kill that behemoth next. Can’t take down the transformer until it's dead.”

“Yes. The Fatman will take at least two strikes. A missile launcher, ten. Both could cause damage to the enclosure.”

“Gonna have to shoot it like a fish in a barrel.”

“Yes.”

“It’ll suffer. It’s not fair.”

“Life is not fair.”

She sighs. “I know. Is it weird I don't want to?”

He is only a little surprised. The behemoth, while a genetic and possibly biblical abomination, was being held against its will - as much a slave as any other. They were so stupid they could not even feed themselves, let alone speak or reason. Their smarter supermutant cousins raised them like  exceptionally large and violent dogs, feeding and caring for them, and then setting them on their more troublesome enemies.

He supposes the tin-cans should be proud to be so threatening as to warrant the use of such a beast.

“No. But it will only starve if you leave it. Killing it would be a kindness.”

“I know.”

So they creep down the cliff face to the enclosure and systematically destroy it.

It is long and bloody. Her face is set in a grim mask that says she will do a thing because it is the right thing to do, even if she hates every moment of it.

“Well, fuck,” she says, blood spattered across her nose like another layer of freckles. “That was just depressing.”

“It was.”

“Let's bar the door to the cave. I’m sure they’ve got a bolt hole somewhere, but I don't feel like getting shot in the back while we help these people.”

She can draw so much blood, be so wild and savage and just plain _mean,_ but she can also be soft and kind and selfless. And of the two, he cannot pick which one he admires most.

Both are beautiful to him, two sides of a perfect coin.

The slaves, as it turns out, are not quite slaves yet, but only rounded up to be driven like cattle to Paradise Falls. They are many, and they are _loud._

His Mistress handles them gently, hushing and shushing them, and once they realize they are being rescued and not dragged off to somewhere worse, they quiet down considerably. While they are slightly frightened of Charon, they see that she is not, and accept him as part of her.

He turns and something thumps into his knees, _hard_. Whatever had plowed into him is knocked backwards and into the dust.

And starts to cry.

It is a child. Three or four, six maybe. It could be twelve and Charon might not know. He knows nothing of children except it makes him sick when he is forced to kill them, that he hates it when they scream. And even that he does not fully understand. It is not as if he has ever had any of his own. They are as foreign as Chinese to him.

But it is still there, blonde and small, sitting there in the dirt. He looks around, but no one comes to fetch it and claim it as their own, no one comes to make it stop crying, and it is a noise they cannot afford to allow to continue. While the door is barred, the ‘bolt-hole’ is a possibility, and the less aware the raiders are that their front line has been annihilated, the better. This entire endeavor requires silence, and this small lump on the ground is certainly not silent.

His Mistress is busy helping the wounded, so he holsters his shotgun and plucks it up out of the dirt, holding it awkwardly out in front of him.

“You should be quiet.”

It responds by wailing in his face.

He hitches it onto a hip and bounces it like he has seen people do to their own. Pets its tangled hair like his Mistress had liked, but his hands are not meant for such tasks, and knows they are too big, too heavy, too stained with blood. It does seem to help marginally, because the sounds are at least muffled it buries its face in the space between his neck and shoulder guard and cries so hard it hiccups.

He can feel its tears and what is probably snot soaking his undershirt.

“You are safe now,” he tells it.

It is suddenly silent and looks up at him as if he is insane, and its eyes are an improbable color of blue.

“You sure?” it asks, and under the tear-streaked dirt, Charon thinks it is a girl. Maybe. Its tattered green dress says it probably is.

“Yes.”

“You won’t let them take me?”

“No.”

“Kay. Can you find my daddy?”

“No.”

Her (he thinks) bottom lip quivers like she may start to cry again.

“But I will try.”

This seems to appease her a little.

“Kay. Hey, what happened to your face?”

That is a difficult question to answer. Many things have happened to it. It has been punched, kicked, cut, burned, bludgeoned, and of course ghoulified.

It had not always been that way. He remembers when that last one had happened. It was three months after the bombs fell. He had been shaving. The reflection in the small bit of broken mirror had shockingly red hair, blue eyes, pale skin, a square jaw and wide chin, serious brows that were always ready to frown, and a scar at the corner of his right eye so small no one would notice it except himself - but its origin is not part of this memory. He had always shaved the beard that tended to grow in reddish-blonde instead of the dark red hair, simply because he had never liked the way they were two different colors.

And that day, he nicked himself on the corner of his left jaw - always a tricky place to get left-handed with a combat knife. But instead of the usual spot of blood, a chunk of skin had just...come off.

All the rest happened quickly after that.

“I had an accident.”

She puts a tiny hand on the side of his face and pets at his cheek. He tenses to fight back the recoil, but is surprised when it does not come.

“Bad ouchie,” she says softly.

“Yes.”

“My daddy could fix it. He fixes everybody. He's a doctor.”

“I see. My friend is also a doctor. Would you like to meet her?”

“Is she nice?”

“Yes.”

She thinks about that, solemn look on her little face.

“But is she _good?_ The other people aren’t good. They’re real bad.”

“She is the best person I know.”

“Kay. The bad people that took my daddy, they were so scared, and they ran and ran, but then, all of a sudden, they all fell down and went to sleep. You did that, didn’t you.”

It takes him a moment to understand her meaning.

“Yes.”

“Will you find the other ones and make them sleep, too?”

 _Make them sleep._ Yes, he supposes he will. Violent, bloody, painful sleep that they will never wake from.

“Yes.”

“Good,” she says, seeming very pleased. “They all need a good sleep. That’s what my daddy tells me when I’m being bad.”

Charon hefts her in his arms so she is looking over his shoulder at the cliff face, away from the dead bodies and hulk of bullet-riddled behemoth, and she burrows into him. The armor must poke in places, but she does not seem to notice. He is not sure why, but a large hand steals up to cradle her head and soon she is softly snoring against his shoulder.

He sets off to find his Mistress, and she is in doctor mode, setting a broken leg, cleaning and stitching wounds, holding hands and distributing food and water, and it is beautiful to watch. So kind and gentle, so calm and competent. So he patiently waits for her with the strange, snoring little girl in his arms like she belongs there.

But when his Mistress does finally notice him, she simply stares at him, and he has no earthly idea what it could mean.

“Oh wow,” she says softly. “What a cutie. Is she hurt?”

“No. Only tired. Her father is missing. I said I would try to find him.”

“Right,” she says, like everything is fine, but he can tell that somehow, everything is not fine at all.

His Mistress finds a mattress and makes what appears to be a nest out of clothes stolen from raider corpses. She wrinkles her nose at them, but there is no time to be picky. Charon carefully lays the child in it and fully expects her to wake up, but she simply gives a particularly loud snore and an intelligible mumble and keeps sleeping.

“Poor baby. She’s exhausted.”

“Yes,” he says, covering her up with a jacket and tucking the edges around her, sweeping a tangled blonde curl out of her face. “Her father is a doctor, likely in the caves. I would prefer to find him alive.”

“Of course. Ready to go? This is probably gonna suck. I think they’ve probably figured out we’re here.”

“It does not matter. We will destroy them all.”

She looks up at him, storm cloud gathering.

“You got it, big guy.”

 

**********

 

Charon and his Mistress put them all to sleep.

It is violent and bloody and indescribably glorious.

She sends three impeccably placed rounds through the throat of a missile launcher-wielding raider and his head comes completely off his body.

It is stunning.

Shotguns and rifles, knives and grenades. A face smashed in with a cinderblock, a chest cracked open with a discarded fire-axe. Everything is a weapon. His hands, his elbows, his steel-toed boots. Her with a rope as she strangles someone from behind and rides them gracefully to the ground, grinds her knees into their back, lean muscle of her arms showing through her light armor as she gleefully chokes the life out of her enemy.

They are both injured - cuts and burns, a superficial bullet wound to his arm, her with what will be a spectacular black eye, but it does not matter. The initial push is over, and now they hunt the stragglers.

His Mistress cuts a woman known simply as ‘Madame’ to ribbons with the knife that looks like a short sword in her small hands.

Releasing the scantily clad women who appear to be somewhat friendly is a mistake, but not even he could have known that. One must always assume that a caged thing wants to be rescued. But they are weaponless and have next to nothing on and so are put down just as ruthlessly as the rest.

And then they find him.

He does not look like much, cowering in a small alcove with his hands over his head like the ceiling might fall in on him.

“Don’t kill me! I’m a doctor! I can patch you up!”

His Mistress steps forward, hand out to calm him, but he shrinks back as if she will strike him.

“Please, I have a daughter! I know that doesn’t mean much to you-”

“We know.”

“I’ll do whatever you want! Please, just don't hurt her. I'm a good doctor, I did a good job for these guys, I can do a good job for you-”

“Your daughter. She is small?” Charon asks, because he will be damned if he brings her back the wrong father. “Has blonde hair and very blue eyes, correct?”

“Yeah. Katie. She's four. Blue eyes like mine. Blonde hair like her mother.”

“She is safe.”

The man’s eyes, just as improbably blue as his daughter’s, light up and the hope in them is blinding. Never in a million years would Charon want to be the one to tell him that his daughter was anything less than completely unharmed.

“Oh God. Katie’s okay? You found her?”

“Yes. She is sleeping.”

The man starts to cry, and if seeing a woman cry is uncomfortable, Charon thinks a man crying is easily ten times worse. His Mistress pats his arm and seems more at a loss than Charon is.

“Get yourself together,” he says. “This place is still not safe.”

The man wipes at his eyes and seems to gather his wits. “Sorry. I just thought I’d never see her again. Can I have a gun?”

“Shit yes, you can,” his Mistress says happily. “Pick your poison. Rifle, pistol, or shotgun?”

“Pistol, please. Laser if you have it.”

“Awesome!” She hands him a laser pistol (she usually keeps them to sell or break down for their innards) and a ridiculous amount of ammunition for it. “Hey, though. If you turn around and kill me, I’m gonna have to kill you right back, and then he’s gonna kill you all over again. Capiche?”

“Capiche. And thank you.” The man competently loads the gun, and the way he checks over the complicated and finicky settings every energy weapon seems to have says he is well-suited to using it. “I’m Isaac, by the way.

“Welcome aboard the USS _Revenge_ , Doc Isaac. I’m Captain Crazy-Pants, and this fine figure of a man is Charon.”

Charon snaps off a lazy salute because the endorphins are still running high and it seems the right thing to do.

“He actually steers the boat,” she whispers loudly behind her hand. “I just get to wear the hat.”

Isaac is too grateful and well-mannered to look at her as if she deserves the title of ‘Captain Crazy-Pants’, but he is thinking it loud enough to almost be audible.

“Is there anything else we should know about this place?”

“Yeah. I think you've killed just about everybody, but the store is still left. Smiling Jack,” the man says, spitting out the name. “When Katie and I got caught, they kept me around to patch them up. Held Katie over my head as collateral. It was Smiling Jack’s idea to get into the slave trade. He’s pretty much the only smart one here. Whispers ideas and lets the other think they came up with them on their own. Set up the supply line with Paradise Falls.”

“Nice. Charon, I want to know what he knows.”

“As do I.”

“Do you want to help?” she asks, eyes intent on his face.

He knows what she means. Does he want to pull information from another body with blood and pain? And she again phrases it in a way that would allow him to easily say no.

“I would like that very much.”

“Alright. Doc, you’re safer with us. I don’t need you getting stabbed by somebody hiding in a corner, but when we get to Smiling Jack, stay back.”

The man looks like he wants to argue, so Charon explains it in terms he will understand.

“I will take off his fingers. I have not decided if I will cut them off or pull them off. Both options have merit.”

“He means it’ll be a game-time decision.”

Isaac goes pale, but does not flinch. “Right.”

The three of them find this ‘Smiling Jack’, and true to his word, Isaac covers the exit.

“Oh, Jackie-boy!” his Mistress says in a sing-song voice, and Charon cannot help his grin. He will ruin this ‘Smiling Jack’ and he will revel in it. “You’ve got customers!”

Jack swallows but keeps his smile in place. “I haven’t had so many paying customers in a long time.”

“Now, Jackie! Don’t tell stories! I heard you’ve been real busy! Sticking your fingers into all sorts of interesting capital ventures!”

“Well, I am a businessman! Got to keep an eye out for opportunity and all that. So, what can I do you for? I’ve got just about anything you could want. Guns, ammo, rations, armor-”

“Slaves? Got any of those lying around?”

The smile is gone now. “Nope, not a one.”

“Liar, liar, pants on fire! Now, I’ve heard you have friends in many low places. Like-minded businessmen such as yourself.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Charon?”

“Yes?”

“Would you be terribly inconvenienced if I asked you to help jog his memory?”

Another out. He could refuse and she would not miss a beat, would not hold it over him. But oh, how he wants to say yes.

“Not at all,” he says, and quick as a snake, grabs Smiling Jack by the collar and drags him bodily over the counter. Jack tries to draw his shotgun, but being manhandled makes it more than difficult.

“Mine, mine, mine” his Mistress sings, unholstering Jack’s shotgun and inspecting it. "Ooooo, Charon! I found you a pretty!"

"Have you?"

"Oh, yes," she says, running her fingers all over it. "Pretty, pretty, pretty. Just like you."

Charon snorts through his nose at her. He is many things, but 'pretty' is not one of them. She is drunk on adrenaline, but then again, so is he. Instead of the very nice gun she is holding, he could see her fingers running along his neck, tracing hot lines down his chest, his stomach, hooking his belt and pulling him flush against her-"

“I could just leave,” Jack whines. “Wouldn’t ever see me again!”

Irritating creature. 

“Tell me what I want to know, and that could be a possibility.”

Charon does not even have to pull fingers off. He gets facts, and so quickly he has to focus sharply to remember them all. The fact that almost six shipments of slaves have already gone from Evergreen Mills to Paradise Falls. That the slaver faction would not allow the raiders to join theirs because the raiders did a terrible job and brought most back injured, sick, and many times, completely unable to fulfill their functions. And he gets names, many names, some that are familiar from his days with Sister. He thinks that if he told his Mistress, she would climb aboard her ‘USS _Revenge’_ and let him pull the fingers off Sister, too.

“There! I told you everything!”

“Yay!” his Mistress exclaims, clapping her hands once.

“So I can go?”

Charon looks to his Mistress for an answer.

“What do you think, big guy?”

“Yes. But one thing first.”

Charon maintains all his weapons within an inch of their lives. So it is not surprising how easily his combat knife slices through the big joint of Smiling Jack’s left thumb.

It happens so smoothly and quickly, Jack does not even have time to scream before Charon calmly says, “Two things, I suppose.”

The removal of his right thumb is definitely noticed, and the scream Charon expects finally comes.

 _‘And if your right hand should cause you to sin, cut it off and throw it away,’_ his Mistress recites from some strange book that seems to be absolutely _filled_ with violence.

Charon lets him up and steps away. Being crippled in the Wasteland is a near death sentence. He will never be able to hold a gun or grip a melee weapon. Never be able to pick a lock or disarm a landmine. Smiling Jack stares and sobs at his thumb-less hands as the wounds jet small streams of blood with each beat of his heart.

Charon is going to leave him here. Let the Wasteland have him. Surely another pack of dogs will come calling, ravenous as they are. Or he may slowly bleed out if he keeps staring instead of putting pressure on them.

But Isaac has other plans.

He has come up behind them both, the sound of his steps covered by screams, and unloads his pistol into Smiling Jack’s face.

Charon looks to his Mistress to see what should be done. But she simply shrugs.

_“I have seen that those who sow trouble reap it, that those who plant discord harvest destruction.”_

He decides she is not wrong.

“I’m sorry,” Isaac says, hands shaking as he holsters his gun. “I couldn’t let him go.”

“That’s fine. Let's blow this popsicle stand. You got a kid to say hi to.”

 

**********

 

**_“DADDY!!!”_ **

The sound the child makes is ear-splitting.

She runs faster than something so small should be able to, plowing into Isaac, but he appears to have done this before, taking the extra momentum and swinging her around in a circle.

“Daddy-Daddy-Daddy-you-won’t-believe-it-I-looked-for-you-everywhere-but-you-were-gone-and-I-missed-you-SO-SO-MUCH-and-there-was-a-monster-and-the-big-accident-man-made-the-bad-ones-go-to-sleep-and-I-asked-him-to-find-you- _AND-HE-DID!”_

Isaac is in tears again and mouths a silent ‘thank you’.

Charon stands there, not sure of what to do, but his Mistress has his hand in hers, and when he looks down at her, she is teary eyed, too.

But even as she smiles, Charon knows it is wrong somehow.

 

**********

 

Charon was right. Something is wrong. She should have been riding high with a victory like that, but she is quiet and withdrawn. And it is in the night (day) that he notices the Pip-Boy.

She plays a holotape on it.

The same one, over and over.

Charon does not want to listen, not really. And it is not as if the volume is too loud. But she has replayed it so many times now that the few words he catches at a time have compiled themselves in his brain as the entire thing.

It is her own lost father. The one he had assumed she had simply given up for dead.

She plays it again, ear up close to the speaker, eyes closed like she might be able to wrench more of her father’s words out of it if she could just listen hard enough.

  
_I don't really know how to tell you this. I hope you'll understand, but I know you might be angry._

Angry does not even begin to cover it. Even Charon is angry, angry that her father could be such a man to abandon her.

_I thought about it for a long time, but in the end I decided it was best for you not to know. So many things could have gone wrong, and there's really no telling how the Overseer will react when he finds out. It's best if he can blame everything on me._

Ah yes. And that had worked splendidly. When he had fled with its tail tucked between its legs, did he really think the blame would follow him, neat and clean?

_Obviously, you already know that I'm gone. It was something I needed to do. You're an adult now. You're ready to be on your own. Maybe some day, things will change and we can see each other again. I can't tell you why I left or where I'm going. I don't want you to follow me._

Mixed messages at best. ‘Maybe we can be together some day, but don’t bother to find me’. Is this man not a doctor? Someone with brains? How could he not know the monumental amount of sheer stubbornness his daughter contained?

It is nearing the end now, and he knows the words by heart.

_God knows life in the Vault isn't perfect, but at least you'll be safe. Just knowing that will be enough to keep me going._

So safe. The daughter chased and hunted like an animal for the father’s stupidity.  
_  
Don't mean to rush you, Doc, but I'd feel better if we got this over with._

Then there is another person with a different voice. Her father had known he was abandoning his child for months, likely years, and could not even be bothered to craft a proper message until minutes before he turned tail and ran.  
_  
Okay. Go ahead. Goodbye. I love you._

She says those last three words silently to herself, and Charon can see the way her lips move as they spell it out. Three syllables that mean everything.

His Mistress looks so small curled up on her blanket that she burrows in when they are out in the field. Her eyes are glossy, big and sad, speaking of mist and quiet-places.

“I miss my daddy,” she says.

 

Charon hates him.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For your reference and to give credit where credit is most certainly due, the readings, quotes, and literary mentions from this chapter are (in chronological order):
> 
> Moby Dick - Herman Melville  
> Where the Red Fern Grows - Wilson Rawls  
> Song of the Open Road - Walt Whitman


	18. When The Rain Speaks On Windowpanes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, a few readers have asked what music inspires me when I write. My Spotify is a huge part of my life. If you're curious, here's a playlist I have on loop. 
> 
> https://open.spotify.com/user/1252717223/playlist/3PdXUdTZ6V3wY8fjBFJamf
> 
> Also, some readers have asked what the hell happened to me. Well, a lot. Bought a house, planted a garden, learned to quilt, pretty much took a break. My writing process (if that's what you prefer to call this particular unhealthy hyperfixation) is like a natural disaster. It strikes without warning, fills the sky with light and thunder, and then leaves just as quickly as it came.
> 
> It sucks.
> 
> Sorry, guys. I'll try to do better.
> 
> So, musical inspiration provided by:
> 
> Sad Seine - Lambert  
> New Stole - Tricky  
> La valse d'Amelie - Yann Tiersen  
> Riverside - Agnes Obel  
> Far Away - Jose Gonzalez  
> Bloodstream - Stateless  
> Good Love - Zola Blood  
> Touch and Go - Bob Moses  
> Silhouettes - Zola Blood  
> The Lengths - The Black Keys  
> Give It Away - Zero 7  
> Count Souvenirs - Junior Boys  
> Slow Moves - Jose Gonzalez  
> Dorian - Agnes Obel

**********

 

Dogmeat likes this little people-pup he has been told to stay and guard.

Girl-Pup doesn’t pull his ears or tear at his fur or step on his tail or poke his eyes like some other people-pups had. She had pet his ears nicely and fed him good things, rubbed him between his eyes like Goddess had showed her and scratched his belly until he got kicky-legs.

They had played many fun games, too. She played the ‘boop’ game where she would _sooooo_ slowly, put one finger on his nose, and then say ‘boop!’, and he would pretend to be very fierce and eat it. The one-eyed man had been nervous, but when Dogmeat showed that he would never hurt her, One-Eye laughed and did it himself and said Dogmeat was a ‘damn fine animal’. She also played something called ‘tag’, which Dogmeat is _very_ good at. Sometimes, the boy-pup would play too, and that was the best because then there were _two_ people-pups to chase. Sometimes, when they played ‘fetch’, One-Eye would throw the stick _so_ far, _way_ further than Girl-Pup could. Even further than Goddess.

It makes his tail thump to wonder how far Large-One could throw if he ever had a mind to play.

And then, when the sun went down and they were both very tired, One-Eye made a whistle and they would both trot back to her den to eat. She sneaks him people-food under the table and One-Eye pretends not to notice. Then she would snuggle up next to Dogmeat on her small bed and they would sleep like puppies in a pile.

But Dogmeat had still missed Goddess very much.

She is home now, but she had come home sad and had stayed that way.

Dogmeat does not understand it. He licks her hand, and she shows him her happy teeth, but in a moment, they are gone again. She does not talk or sing or howl to the moon any more.

He wonders what she needs. So Dogmeat brings her all the good things he finds. A big bone he had buried ages ago that is finally just right. An old shoe that had smelled really nice. Half a rustle-rustle bug, the ones that flap their wings and scurry. (The trip to fetch it had been very long and he had gotten very hungry, so that is why there was only half.)

She takes his gifts and shows her teeth and rubs between his eyes, but her own don’t sparkle, they don’t crinkle up at the corners. Large-One senses it, too. He watches her carefully with his own strange eyes. But for all his watching, Large-One can’t seem to find what Goddess needs either.

Large-One pets her sometimes on the thick, wild fur that she has on her head, and she leans into his hand. Other times, she lays her head on one of his too-long legs and they sit and stare at their strange paper-packs. Sometimes, they stare at nothing at all.

These things help for a while, but they still do not fix it.

Goddess is whimpering like a frightened puppy in her sleep like she does so often now, and Dogmeat huffs in frustration where he stands guard at the end of her bed, chin on his paws.

It is some strange people-problem, and Dogmeat is not a people.

 

**********

 

_Goodbye. I love you._

Lucky knows it's no good. It's no good to do this to herself, to listen to the holotape over and over until she knows every word like she knows her own hands, the way she knows every feature of Charon’s face. But she still listens as if she might be missing something, like there might be something new in the spaces between the words, something in his voice she needs to pay just a little more attention to.

_Goodbye. I love you._

She hates him, hates him for leaving, hates that she wasn’t important enough to take with. Hates him for not trusting her, for lying to her. Hates him for thinking her so stupid that she wouldn’t find out, so weak that she couldn’t make it out here.

She had needed him, and he bolted. He could have taught her about the Wasteland, but instead, he ran, and she had to learn everything her own damn self.

And it had almost killed her at least a thousand times, scarred her in a thousand ways she hadn’t even thought possible. Had turned her into a monster with poison-cup bones, had taken her blood and replaced it with the blank-story stars too cold to touch.

But as much as she hates him, she still loves him, too.

She listens to it again.

_Goodbye. I love you._

Charon takes her wrist - gently, because he’s always gentle with her. Gentle with kids, too, little pretty ones with ocean eyes and baby-fat legs, ones that fold themselves into his big nest of a shoulder like tiny birds and sleep because they know they’re totally safe.

Little pretty ones she's too fucked up and ruined to ever have.

_Goodbye. I love you._

“Stop,” he says, quiet in her ear, pushing the eject button.

Now she only listens to it when she's sure he's asleep.

It feels like lying.

 

**********

 

It's so small, sitting there in the palm of Nova’s hand.

Small enough to make her wonder how it could have so much power, so much clout. How it had made everything bearable, but had ruined everything, too.

The first time, she had been young. Thirteen. Fourteen, maybe. A man came to the house, talked with her mother.

 

_“Fine enough, I guess,” the man says. “Sixty caps.”_

_“You're the first,” Mama says. “I want double.”_

_The man looks at Nova, eyes sliding over her like rancid oil that sticks in places._

_“Done,” he says, counting caps into a bag. “But I’ll know if you’re lyin’.”_

_“Fair enough,” Mama says as she opens The Box, the little tin drawer she hides her own small things in - bright packages of candy-colored pills, red inhalers, thin glass tubes with needles on the ends._

_It's been empty a lot lately, and an empty Box always makes Mama mean._

_Mama sits close to Nova, too close. Nova can never tell what mood she might be in, and it changes so fast, it makes close real dangerous. But Mama pets her hair soft, and Nova leans into her hand, because it doesn’t happen too often, and she wants it to last as long as it can._

_“I don't got all day,” the man says, thunking the bag of caps down hard on the table, and Nova doesn't like him._

_“Mind your fuckin’ manners,” Mama bites back, words sharp in her mouth, but she looks at the bag of caps like it's something beautiful. “You’ll get what you paid for.”_

_Mama holds a red inhaler in her hand. Nova is never to touch those or anything else that comes out of The Box, but she knows what it is, knows how it makes people twitchy and talkative. “Here, baby,” Mama says, bringing the inhaler up to Nova’s mouth. “Breathe in when I say so.”_

_“Mama-”_

_“It’s okay, baby. Promise.” Mama’s fingers twirl a lock of hair into a curlique and it feels nice. Maybe today is a good day. One without kicks and slaps. Maybe it is okay._

_“Breathe.”_

_Nova does, and it tastes like Abraxo smells. She chokes and gasps, but Mama grabs a fistful of hair and holds on tight and Nova falls and falls, falls until everything is quiet and heavy and oh so slow. It's hard to tell what's real and what's not. The man's eyes are big and bright. He smiles with all his teeth._

_“See? It makes it all better, don’t it?”_

_“Mmmhmm,” Nova says._

_He looks hungry, and Nova wonders what for._

 

And it had made everything better. Made the fact that her own mother had rented her out like a hotel room just go away for a while. And on and on it went. Mama’s house for two more years until Nova found her, blue-lipped and cold with three empty syringes of Med-X spilled on the floor. Nova had stumbled out into the wasteland and right into a raider gang. She learned some things there, being their ‘best girl’. Learned a few little ways to make other people hurt, and a few more to make herself hurt a little less. And the Jet had helped then, too. Made it easier to just float away where no one could find her. It gave her a place where she could hide things inside so no one could crack her open and take them like they had taken everything else.

Now, just the shape of it does something to her brain. The rounded mouthpiece, whose scratches tell her she’s clamped her teeth around it a few times before, makes her mouth water in anticipation of the dusty, bitter aerosol across her tongue. The light weight of it makes the tips of her fingers tingle, knowing that even something so small could change everything, if only for a few hours. Someone had told her it was made from brahmin shit, but Nova didn't really believe them. They probably only said that to get her to quit. But even if it was, why should she? What was inhaling a little brahmin shit when the world was a hundred times shittier?

Fuck what it was made out of, just look at the color of it. Such a bright, obnoxious red, it had to be fake, something you'd never see growing wild. But around here, it seems to grow on trees just to spite her.

Nova had stumbled on this particular inhaler after scrubbing a floor and seeing that flash of red under a loose grate. One of the little secret stashes she always kept. Not because she wanted it for a rainy day, but because just before she started to come down, she’d get paranoid. So paranoid that she’d hide them in places and forget that she had hidden any there at all. There’s only a dose or two left in this one, but even a little scrap like this is definitely enough to calm the clawing in her brain.

And it does claw. Kicks and scratches and spits venom while it cries and whines. Thanks to Lucky, it’s out of her stomach now, at least. But it still scritches at the inside of her skull. Night is the worst. The world is quiet with all its people sleeping, but not Nova. It howls in her head, makes her pick and chew at her fingernails until they bleed. Makes her try to do anything to stop the roar of it.

So she cleans. It's the only thing that makes it stop for a while. Makes it all a little quieter. And when she's elbow deep in a bucket of water, it's almost silent.

But it never lasts. And when she does sleep, there’s nightmares, ones she hasn’t had since she was tiny. The kind you can’t remember in the morning, and for that, they're worse. They're shadowy and dark, made of nothing but ghosts and mist, but she still wakes up drenched in sweat and bawling.

Gobbie hears her. Who wouldn't though? The first time she'd screamed in her sleep he'd used his shoulder like a battering ram and knocked the door off one hinge. Once he figured out she wasn't being murdered, he had just sort of stood there, all cute and confused. Apologized for knocking her door down but didn't dare touch her.

Nova remembers how the muscle of his back had flexed and knotted under his shirt when he put her door back together, and she wishes he would.

But she had promised him she was fine. Told him go back to bed, that everything was fine. But it's not fine. Not even close.

The plastic from the inhaler is warm from the heat of her palms as they start to sweat. She doesn't have to rely on scraps like this anymore. Doc Church would sell Psycho to a feral if he thought they had any caps. And Nova’s got caps, now. More caps at once than she thinks she's ever had in her entire life. Gobbie had paid her what Moriarty owed her the first chance he got. Took it right out of the till before she could even ask about it.

 

_“Are you sure?” she asks, because there has to be way more caps in the bag than she could have earned._

_“Nova, I swear I wouldn’t short you. I went through all the books, figured up what he made from the bar, and what was left had to be-”_

_“No. I just mean...it’s a lot. Thank you.”_

_Gobbie looks at her like she’s the sun that just came up, and it melts something icy inside._

 

Nova could have left. Had enough caps in her pockets to go wherever she wanted. But there’s nowhere for her now, and Nova’s smart enough to know it. And she’s got friends, too. Sort of. People who look out for her, anyway. People that wouldn't want her to do this to herself because they think she’s better than that.

Her friends are sweet as soda, but sometimes they can be pretty… what's the word Lucky had used? _Naive?_

Nova turns the Jet over in her hands, and thinks that maybe she was just born to be no good. Some people are like that. Just… busted. Always have been, always will be.

As she puts the mouthpiece between her teeth and squeezes the spring-loaded depressor - slow and steady like pulling the trigger of a gun - she thinks that maybe she owes it some credit. It had taken care of her when it could. Made things quiet and not worth worrying about. Made it all okay for a while. And who could ask for more?

  
Nova inhales, quick and deep, and floats away to the place where no one else can follow.

 

**********

 

_“Chaaaarooon.”_

Charon looks up from his book with what appears to be only one eye.

“Yes?”

_“Yuuuurrrrggggh.”_

“Hmmm.”

“It’s just...so fucking... _hot!”_

“Yes,” he acknowledges but goes back to reading as if the world isn’t melting like a candle that's been shot into the sun.

“Is this normal?!”

“More or less.”

“Well, it's a hellscape.”

Lucky is flopped out flat on the metal floor, flipping from front to back every few minutes like a piece of sizzling bacon in a pan.

“Ugh. This spot is all icky now,” she whines, barrel-rolling to a cooler spot that hasn’t been ruined by her own body heat, which has to be running ten degrees above her average 98.6. Even Dogmeat is lying on his side and panting like he might be half-dead and the puddle of drool under his muzzle is getting out of hand.

Charon seems just fine, the smug bastard.

“How?” she demands.

“How what?”

_“How do you even live?!”_

He seems to ponder that question. “I suppose the heat does not bother ghouls like it does smoothskins. And you are... softer...than most.”

She glares at him for being comfortable while her organs are doing their level best to roast themselves and Lucky can't decide if she should be insulted or not.

“I’m going to die.”

If he would have had a pair of glasses he would have peered over them. “You will not _die.”_

“Will too. You just watch. I can see it now. ‘Local Girl Becomes First Human Soup’.”

He snorts through his nose at her and goes back to reading while she attempts to calculate the surface temperature of hell and decides emigrating might be preferable to staying on this plasma burn of a planet.

But when a trickle of sweat runs down her scalp and into her ear canal, that’s when she loses her everloving shit.

“Animals live like this, Charon!” she yells, sitting bolt upright and she is angry.  “ _Animals!”_

He shrugs like it's true, but also like he's not sure what he's supposed to do about it.

 

**********

 

 _“This_ is your solution?”

Even muffled, his voice sounds grumpy, but that's just too bad. Somebody had to do _something._

“Mmmhmm. And it's a good one.”

“Come out of there.”

“Why?”

“You will suffocate. Or be poisoned.”

“Totally worth it.”

“Mistress-”

A view of the ceiling appears and Charon’s grump-butt face right after.

“Oh, hello! Welcome to Lucky’s Day Spa! Would you like to book a reservation?”

“No. At least stick your head out.”

“Fine.” She pokes her head out of the tent she's made out of half a battered plastic tarp wrapped around the Nuka-Cola machine with its door wide open and cold air blasting out. Smells like freon and holes in the ozone, and sure, maybe it's a little stuffy, but it’s also _heavenly._ “Better?”

He just grumbles. “And when the motor overheats?”

“Don't you put that evil on me!”

And just like that, the machine makes a loud pop and a fizzle as the engine grinds to a halt.

“Bad juju!” she says, pointing an accusing finger at him through the new porthole of her oasis-soon-to-be-sweatlodge.

“This is ridiculous.”

“No, it's _sweltering!”_

He crosses his arms and looks positively _done._ “You are impossible to deal with.”

And is he ever right. Irritating, loud, selfish - Lucky wouldn't want to live with her either. And poor Charon gets to live with her 24/7.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly, packing up the tarp and goes to head upstairs. It's hot as balls up there, but at least she can give him a break.

He sighs and rubs a knuckle at the corner of his eye like he's getting a headache. “I did not-”

“I know. I’m cranky. I'm just gonna go try to sleep.”

Charon quietly opens a bottle of water, carefully dumping some on a rag. “Come here and hold still.”

She does and he gently presses the rag onto the back of her neck and folds it around like a scarf.

“Drink the rest, please,” he says, handing her the opened the bottle.

Lucky decides she's about as dumb as a box of rocks, because the minute the water hits her tongue, she realizes just how dehydrated she is.

“Charon, I'm really worried about this heat. It's no good, and you're right. No matter how long I Iive out here, I'm always gonna be too soft.”

He looks at her sidelong and seems to think a moment.

“If you do not mind a bit of travel, I would show you a thing.”

“A surprise?!”

“If you consider it so.”

“But won't it be too hot?”

“If we travel at night and through a few tunnels, you should be well enough. It will be good for you, I think.”

“Awww! You care about me!”

He tsks through his teeth at her, but the grumble doesn't reach his eyes. “You cannot seem to care for yourself, so someone has to.”

 

**********

 

“Charon?”

“Yes?”

“Why are we in a hole?”

“This is not a hole.”

“Um, this is the definition of a hole.”

And it is. A huge bowl set into the ground with concrete steps placed mathematically precise all up the sides and a large, flat platform along the bottom. Of course, it’s been overrun with weeds and wild grasses, but the shape is still recognizable.

“It is an _amphitheatre,”_ he tells her. “People used to come here to listen to music. Or watch performances.”

“Performances? You mean plays? Like Othello?”

“Othello?”

“How do you know about amphitheatres and not Othello?!”

“In the same way you know about Othello and not amphitheatres.”

“Touche.”

“This is not our destination. I simply thought you might like to see it.”

And Lucky has to admit, it _is_ pretty neat. She could imagine people all sitting together, listening to music or watching the plays. How it would all be fresh and new and alive and how the performers would be, too. How the people in the crowd might dance or sing along if it was a song they knew. How couples would fall in love to the swells of song and heavy night air.

“What do you remember about before?” she asks.

Charon sighs, and it sounds a little tired.

“Things that are of no use to anyone.”

 

**********

 

“I'm not going in there.”

“It is perfectly safe.”

“Nope. I left my floaties at home.”

“You will be much cooler if you get in the water. And you need to learn to swim. It is important.”

“Fine. But if I slip beneath the choppy waves to an early and watery grave, I'm holding you personally responsible.”

“There are no waves here.”

“Ugh. You know what I mean. What if a mirelurk bites you on the ass?”

He gives her _‘The Look’._ The one that says, ‘come on, you've got to be smarter than this.’

“I have already scouted the perimeter and deployed countermeasures.”

“Exploding countermeasures?”

“Yes. Are you satisfied?”

“With you? Always.”

Charon snorts at her and carefully stows his shotgun and toes off his boots.

Sliding off her own pack and letting it thump to the deck with a soft clang, Lucky sets her rifle against it and turns out her pockets. No sense in losing anything important to this lake…thing. Or whatever the hell this place is. There's a few overturned boats and _tons_ of platform-thingys - _docks,_ she thinks - but it’s like nothing Lucky’s ever seen before.

“Hey, Charon? What was this place? Did people fish or...um, wow. Okay.”

Turning around to ask him if people really ate the fish from here and what the boats were for, he’s just hanging out in his skivvies, looking like some marble statue of a Greek god come alive.

She tries to tear her eyes away from, well, _everything,_ but they're traitorous, gluttonous organs who don't give two shits about obedience, so they roam all over - thick neck to powerful shoulders, rolling muscle of his chest and meaty stomach tapering down to that ‘v’ all fit, sexy people seem to have, and after that-

“What?” he asks, all confused like he doesn't know how gorgeous he is or has no clue how badly she wants to try out the phrase ‘climb him like a tree’.

“Nothing!” she squeaks. “Just…looking for the Rad-X.”

“Top left pocket in the right compartment,” he says without even having to think, but he's still looking at her like he wants to say something.

Of course, he's Charon, so he doesn't.

But Lucky can be brave. So she peels off her armor too and Christ, the slight breeze (hot as it is) is fucking fantastic. Maybe that's all she needed. Just to traipse around in her underwear and air out all the best bits. The sides of the lake are steep with sharp rock and she wonders how she's supposed to get in without cutting her bare feet to ribbons, but apparently, Charon has a plan.

He dives in headfirst, and it's simultaneously the prettiest and scariest thing Lucky’s ever seen. Pretty because all that long, lean muscle makes a beautiful arc to cut through the water like a knife, and scary because he doesn't come back up.

Seconds like minutes, and still no Charon, just that churning water with little bubbles scattered like pearls. Dogmeat whines and Lucky does too.

“Charon?”

No Charon, just the bubbles fizzing and the churning water beginning to smooth and settle.

Lucky starts to panic, brain racing to find a solution. Going in after him is stupid. She hasn't got anything that will float, and even if she did, she couldn't dive to find him. Probably couldn’t even see three feet in front her face in water so murky.

She jumps in anyway.

It goes about as well as expected.

The shock of the water is enough to stop her entire body in its tracks - brain, muscle, nerves - the whole five-foot package grinds to a standstill and she sinks like a stone. Jumping was a mistake. Maybe she could have kept afloat if she had eased in, but in her typically idiotic way, she had sprinted and jumped off the dock with wholehearted conviction. And the water gets colder the deeper she goes. Her body finally catches up and starts to panic, arms and legs flopping in a sorry effort to get to the dimly lit surface, but it's fairly apparent she's not going to make it in time.

Something grabs her wrist and yanks, pulling her up until she sputters and gasps air back into her lungs.

“Stop flailing. You are safe.”

Lucky blinks the water out of her eyes and finds that with both of his big hands holding her up by the waist, she is exactly that.

“Damn near drowned,” she wheezes as he lifts her onto the dock.

“Yes. Jumping in was…unwise.”

“You did it! Could have broke your damn neck too!”

Charon snorts. _“I_ know how to swim. And this is the Capital Marina. Twenty feet at its shallowest point. Deep enough for tri-deck yachts to moor,” he says, lightly hauling himself up onto the deck next to her like some kind of ridiculously good-looking merman.

“And how the hell do you know all that?”

Charon looks out over the water that sparkles under moon and starlight and says nothing.

“Sorry. You don't have to talk about it if you don't want-”

“I…lived here, I think,” he quietly tells the water. “Before the War. I had a boat. A small one. With sails. I cannot remember its name. Only that it was well made for its size.”

Lucky doesn't move, doesn’t dare say anything, because she's afraid if she says one wrong word, he’ll never tell her anything like this again. But he goes quiet, and like an idiot, she just can’t help herself.

“What color was it?”

Still staring out at the water, she wonders if he even remembers she's there.

“Red. But dark. White sails with a large blue ‘F’ at the top. I do not remember what it means. Meant, I suppose. It all means nothing now.”

“It means something to me.”

He looks at her as if he’d just heard a dog solve for _x,_ but only stares out at the water again. Lucky splashes a little with her feet and enjoys the silence because it’s a nice, full one - one that stretches out calm and easy. She admires the way the moon makes a sister-twin on the glass-smooth water, likes the drops that sparkle as they slide down her good shin. Not the ugly one, though. That one makes her almost sick to look at. But Charon said it wasn’t ugly, and she thinks he meant it, even if only to make her feel better.

“Would you like to try swimming again?” he asks quietly.

“As long as there's no drowning this time.”

He slides down into the water and Lucky follows cautiously, keeping a white-knuckled grip on the dock that would have throttled it if it had been alive.

“You have to let go,” he tells her, and Lucky wonders if he means more than just the dock.

So she does. She lets go of the dock and relaxes into the big hands that hold her up so she can float on her back and look at the stars as they turn in their sky. Lets the water hold her up too, lets it carry her weight. Lets it lap soft at her skin and take away a few things that need taking.

She's not sure how long Charon lets her floats like this, weightless in the silence. Minutes, hours, whole geological eras - who can tell? But he says nothing, so she doesn’t either. She traces the pin-prick points of light into their ageless constellations - Andromeda and Aquarius, Pegasus and Pisces - she tells herself all their forgotten stories and listens to the new ones they tell her in return. The stars keep glinting, the moon keeps shining, and the whole, exhausted world finally slows down to rest for a while.

When she finally works up the courage to move, she is shocked to find herself all alone in water yards deeper than she is tall, but she's not scared. Charon sits next to Dogmeat on the dock a few yards away, feet in the water and watching her float. Striking out as smooth as she can, Lucky says goodbye to the moon and the stars and finds a rhythm through the water - arms and legs sharing beats of time, working together instead of against each other. It can't be graceful, but it must be at least effective, because she reaches the dock without drowning.

Hauling herself up is work, but Charon grabs her hand and helps her flop onto the metal decking beside him.

“Thanks,” she says quietly, laying her head on his shoulder, and she hopes Charon understands all that word means.

 

**********

 

Nova comes down the stairs and Gob watches her.

He always watches her. Every morning. Every night. Not that he’s _trying_ to be creepy, but Nova is the kind of person that you just couldn't help but watch.

“Morning,” she says, voice a little too husky, like she'd just finished a cigarette. Except she hasn’t because she rarely smokes and if she does, it’s always outside.

“Morning,” he parrots back to her.

She fixes a little breakfast. Just a little. Always a little. But not really always. When she first came here, she had eaten more. Had smiled the real smile more. It's like she's forgotten how to do both.

Her fingers move - clever fingers full of tricks, shuffling cards at a poker game. But she's not playing cards. Just pouring a splash of brahmin milk into a cup of mutfruit. But those fingers twitch and tap, twitch and tap. Always moving just a bit too quick.

She catches him watching and smiles a smile that's almost real, but it’s just a little too big with a few too many teeth.

“Want some?” she asks, beautiful blue eyes with their pupils just a touch too wide, tracking just a hair too fast.

She's using again.

But she keeps herself in line. Never too high that anyone would notice but him. But he does notice, and he hates it. What the hell is he supposed to do? Kick her out? For doing what everybody does? Some people drink. Some people shoot up Med-X or pop Mentats. Some people, like Lucky, don't do either and still make more trouble than a peace-time army.

“Gobbie?”

“I thought you quit,” he says quietly.

“I did.”

“Please don’t lie to me. Not me.”

She melts a little. Sort of just deflates like someone let everything out and she's gotten real small. She won't look at him, just talks to the cup of mutfruit instead.

“I’m sorry. It's just harder this time. A lot harder than I thought it'd be.”

“This time? You've done this before?”

She laughs soft and it cuts like broken beer bottles on clumsy fingertips.

“More times than I can count. It's alright at first. Easy, sometimes. But then something happens. And you just start up like you never quit.”

“What happened this time?”

“Nothing. That’s what makes it worse. It just won't let go.”

Gob’s not willing to let her go either, not really. He knows he's weak. That he hangs on to things that he shouldn't. Things that aren’t good for him, things that end up hurting in the end. But even if it hurts, he knows he couldn't let go anyway.

“What do you need?”

Nova looks up at him, and there's hurt of her own there, but he doesn't understand where it comes from or how deep it runs. Right down to the middle, he thinks.

“Just… I don't know. Be there, maybe? I promise I'll try. I know promises don't mean much coming from a junkie-”

“So talk to me. About whatever. Or nothing. Just don’t lie to me.”

She takes a big breath and blows it out, like she's getting ready to jump off a cliff.

“Okay,” she says, and he hopes she means it.

 _Hope is a thing with feathers,_ Carol had told him once. Recited, really - slow and pretty like she had recited so many other things that were so much older than even her.

But if Gob’s learned anything in his many years, it's that hope is a tired, worn-out thing that's got no feathers at all.

 

**********

 

 _Things are good_ , Gob thinks as he polishes the glasses he’d just bought off Wolfgang. They don’t quite match, but they’re awful close.

They’re also awful dirty.

Nova does talk to him, now. All the time. At really weird hours. Sometimes, she’ll leave and come back ten minutes later. Sometimes, she doesn't talk all day.

They talk about everything. The weather, the town, the people. Things she wonders about the world that he knows but can’t quite remember learning. About stars and animals hundreds of years gone and why clouds are different shapes. Sometimes about the future, but never the past. Sometimes, she asks him to read to her. Gets books from Lucky and when he apologizes that he doesn't know all the words or that his voice probably isn't pretty, she shakes her head impatiently.

“That's stupid. Your voice is fine. You've been talking my ear off and I keep coming back, right?”

So he reads and she closes her eyes and tilts her head like she wants sun on her face, and she's beautiful.

And it's good. Really good. Her fingers have slowed down, her eyes aren’t too big, and her smile has the right number of teeth again.

But Gob’s still worried. And also confused. And a little nervous.

Besides talking, Nova’s been nice to him. Real nice.

Too nice.

She’d always been nice, though. Or at least, not nasty like everybody else. Never stuck her neck out too far, but she’d patch him up sometimes after a beating. Always in the dark and after Moriarty was good and passed out, though.

But now? Now she's different, and for the life of him, Gob can’t figure out how or why.

Sure, she’d apologized for a whole bunch of things that weren't even her fault. Said she didn’t blame him if he wanted to kick her out. Said she wouldn’t think any less of him if he did.

Of course, he hadn’t. Couldn’t. Not when she had been the only good person to him besides Lucky and Carol. So when they had a talk about the future, Gob said she could stay in her old room and work as a waitress, if she wanted. He wouldn’t charge her for rent, and when he told her it wouldn’t pay like her other...work, she said she didn't want to be rich, she just wanted to be happy.

Then she’d gone and _hugged_ him.

In the whole five years she had worked there, she had always been careful not to touch him. Even when she patched him up, it had been quick and impersonal, just enough to get the job done, and then she would avoid him for days. Maybe because she couldn’t stand touching him and only did it because nobody wants to watch a ghoul with busted fingers try to pour drinks.

But this hug hadn’t been a fake ‘this is what nice people do’ hug. No, she had wrapped both arms around him and _squeezed_ , the side of her face buried in his chest, and she had stayed like that for what seemed like ever.

And like an idiot, he had hugged her back, letting the warm of her soak through his shirt like hot sun on a rock. Too soon, she had stepped away, cheeks pink and pretty, and smiled the real smile.

“Thank you,” she had said, soft and quiet, like she meant that, too.

And it wasn’t the last time she’d done it, either. She’d hugged him _in front of people._

Well, if Lucky and that big bastard that follows her like a shadow can count as ‘people’. But Nova had peeked her face out at them from under his arm and squeezed, just like before. He’d craned his neck and lifted his arm to look at her the way you do when you’ve been bitten on the ass and you're trying to figure out what did it, but she’d just grinned up at him and squeezed again before finally letting him go.

She doesn’t touch him all the time, but still a lot. Not like with people who came in to the bar, or her old clients. These were touches with none of the flirting.

Quick fingers on his arm when she talks to him.

A minute of nice squeezes to the back of his neck from behind when he’d spent hours hunched over at his desk trying to wrestle with the disaster that was Moriarty’s account books.

Her hand along his shoulder when she comments how dirty his shirt is.

Then she goes and steals it when he’s asleep and scrubs the shit out of it, laughing and not cringing at all when he wakes up and has to wait shirtless while it dries. She just giggles and steals looks while she thinks he's not paying attention. Maybe she's just never seen a half-dressed ghoul before, and it's probably like looking at a trainwreck. You know you shouldn't, but you just can’t help yourself.

Gob figures he’d better get his ass in gear and scrub his pants or he’ll be running around without those, too.

So yeah. Gob is confused, but mostly worried. But what worries him most is that she’d been working herself almost to death. Gob had caught her a few times, clutching at her forehead or breathing hard. Had told her to sit down, but she’d just smile and never would.

Well, this time he's had it, because she’s just passed out.

There had been a great big crash upstairs, and she hadn’t answered when he hollered to make sure she was okay. He’s got her laid out on the floor where she’d been scrubbing the bedrooms. A bed would have been better, but she's got those all torn apart to clean, too.

“Nova? Nova! Wake up!” Taking a palm full of the water she'd been using to scrub, he splashes a little water on her face and a couple things happen at once.

She takes a big lungful of air and comes off the floor like it had burned her, and it turns out that Gob - looking down into her face to try to figure out if she's alive - is in the wrong place at the wrong time, because her forehead smashes right into his nose, the one place hitting a ghoul is the worst, except in the jewels, mind you.

Gob doesn’t _quite_ get airborne, but it's a close thing.

There's blood everywhere, Nova’s shrieking _‘shit’_ over and over again until it all just becomes one long word, and now Gob is the one laid out on the floor wondering how his good luck could have turned so quickly.

“Oh my God, I'm so sorry!” she says, bringing a towel up to his face and pinching down on it.

Like he’s got a nose or something.

Her eyes go wide when she figures it out for herself.

“Oh.”

“Yeah, I know. Yuck,” he says, but it comes out weird and nasally. “Gotta kinda stuff it...in there...ah fuck, that hurts.”

“It’s not ‘yuck’. You’re not...yuck.”

She’s looking at him like she's not lying, looking at him like he’s important or something, and he remembers why they’re both sitting on the floor like a couple of little kids.

“Nova, you gotta take it easy. You're gonna work yourself to death, and you were just sick-”

“I wasn't sick, I was a junkie. Besides, you need help. That's what friends do. We are friends, right?”

“Of course we're friends. You’re about the only friend I've got.”

“Have you ever thought about being more than friends?”

She's gotten real close to him and he’s not totally sure how she did it without his noticing. And the way she says it, quiet and right in his ear, it makes him shiver, but it’s still got that sound, the one he's heard so many times before, but for other people and never him.

It makes him sick to his stomach.

“Nova, no,” he says before he thinks, but it's too late now. “You don't have to do that anymore. Not for anybody. Me least of all.”

“You're kidding.”

“No, I'm not kidding! I'm not Moriarty, you know!”

She looks like he’d just slapped her.

“No, but you can still be a prick,” she announces as she tries to get to her feet, but wobbles and crashes into a wall. She slithers to the floor and just sits there, head between her knees and refusing to look at him.

Gob’s gone and fucked it all up, now. Best he can do is apologize. Although, for exactly what, he's not quite sure.

“Nova. I'm sorry. I just meant you don’t have to do stuff like that anymore. You can do what _you_ want now. Not what anybody says you have to.”

Her head snaps up and she’s got gorgeous eyes, so bright and clear, like his used to be. Someone had said he had ‘hazel’ eyes, whatever that meant. But hers have unshed tears welling up, and she angrily brushes one away.

“I just want to be happy! Can I not have one fucking thing I want?”

“Of course you can!”

“Well, I want you.”

Wait, what?

“Nova, you don’t want-”

“ _Don’t tell me what I want!”_

She's _mad_ , now. Real mad. And it's scary. Nova never gets mad. Just laughs everything off with one of those lazy smiles and a wink, like the whole world’s just one big joke and she’s the only one who gets it.

But she's not laughing now.

“Don’t you _dare_ tell me what I want is wrong! I haven't wanted or cared about anything in years and I'm fucking sick of it! Every day, just waiting to hurry up and die, didn’t even have the guts to overdose cuz I’m a coward, and you were the only one that didn’t treat me like garbage-”

“Nova-”

“Oh, don't get me wrong. People like me. ‘Nova, you're so pretty!’ ‘Nova, you’re so beautiful!’ ‘Nova, run away with me!’ I just wanted somebody who wants to know _me,_ not how much I charge and if they can pretty please get a blowjob thrown in for free like they’re somebody special or something-”

“Nova-”

”You know, maybe I can’t read, but I’m not stupid. I know you’re better than trash like me, but why’d you have to go and be so fucking _nice_ all the time, huh? The one thing I wanted, the one good thing I had, and you were just being _nice_. Well, just fuck me sideways and call me disappointed-”

“Nova-”

“And the worst part is now I ruined _everything!_ I tried to go slow like Lucky said, but I don’t know how to do this stuff, and I know I’m fucked up-”

“ _NOVA!”_

_“WHAT?!”_

“I love you is all.”

Her face is a blank slate. Completely blank, like she’d never moved any part of it in her entire life and sure as hell didn’t know how to start now.

“Always have, I guess,” he tells her, staring at the floor because he can’t stand to see the next look on her face, the one that will tell him she only says these things because she thinks she has to. “But it's okay. You didn’t ruin anything. You've always got a place here. Cuz, you know, I'll probably outlive you…”

She's laughing.

Gob swings his head up and when she sees his face, probably looking pretty miserable, she laughs like he's never heard her laugh. Laughing real and true and crawling over to him on her hands and knees, and he finds he has no idea what to do with his own body.

She does, though.

She lifts his arm up by the wrist, settles it over her shoulders and burrows into his side. She fits there, just like he wondered if she would.

 _“All seems beautiful to me,”_ she says so quiet, and he has no idea what she’s talking about, but he doesn’t care, couldn’t care, because she’s next to him not because she has to, but because she really _wants_ to be.

And it _scares_ him.

“Nova, I don’t know-”

“Hey. It's alright. We’ll just take stuff real slow. Nothing too much, okay?”

“Okay.”

She smiles up at him, blue eyes crinkled at the corners, and that smile is one he's only seen a few times because it's her real one. The one that says she doesn’t want anything in exchange for it, that says she gives it just to give it.

  
And for a moment, everything really is ‘okay’.

 

**********

 

Something’s wrong.

Lucky can feel it in her bones. Can feel it in the way her fingertips prickle and the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand up like Dogmeat’s do when he gets angry. In the way the trickle of sweat that runs down her spine feels clammy like she's sick again.

Lately, she and Charon have been doing little more than languishing and trying not to melt in the brick pizza oven of the Wasteland. The swim had helped, but it's just as hot or hotter now. She had always laughed at the people who are afraid of the dark and won’t live in the night because they're scared.

Lucky’s not laughing now.

It hasn’t got a name, whatever it is that frightens her, but she’s still animal enough to know when a thing is wrong. It’s like a blanket over your head, but one so thick and heavy it would somehow smother you to death if you didn’t pay enough attention.

It makes her anxious and high-strung, unable to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time. All night (well, day, but who could give a shit whether it's dark out yet when the very _air_ feels murderous) it goes like this. Sleep for fifteen minutes and then gasp awake because somehow, she gets the distinct feeling that the world is going to end again, and this time, she'll be unfortunate enough to actually see it happen.

And then, right before she usually gets up, it does.

The whole house explodes without a sound, white-hot light lancing through every single crack in the walls and ceiling like the world is on fire. But that’s not what breaks her.

There's a crash to end all crashes, a sound that laughs at her Nuka grenades, an explosion her bottlecap mines would cower at, and then a sustained barrage of what sounds like gunfire.

She shrieks, loud and sharp, and as the wild animal that still lives in the base of her brain breaks free, she flees. Legs tangled in sheets, she crashes to the floor but flails until she's got her feet back under her. The door is thrown open and she barrels into something solid, but it's in her way, blocking her escape, and it _just won’t move,_ so she claws and scratches and bites, almost sobbing in her need to escape to...who the hell knows but just anywhere other than _here._

But something has a hold of her, pinning her arms to her sides, and as she kicks and struggles, it talks to her.

“Lucky! Lucky what is wrong?!”

Its voice is dust on gravel when it says her name and she knows it like her own skin.

“The whole world’s dying!” she wails, and she knows that sounds crazy, but somehow, it's so _true._ It _is_ dying, cracked wide open until all its guts spill out into just another pile.

“It has been trying to die for quite some time now and still has not managed it.”

The big hands on her arms ground her a little and she looks up into his blue eyes that are scared for her but not of her, eyes that make the animal in the base of her brain pause.

Another crash sounds and she yelps, high and scared, animal threatening to break out again.

“It is only the rain.”

_Rain._

She's heard of it a million times in the books she’s read, in the tapes she's watched. Charles Dickens’ ‘Bleak House’ went ‘drip, drip, drip’ for at least the first twenty chapters. Emily Bronte had made it storm on Catherine and Heathcliff almost constantly. Audrey Hepburn had found her cat and kissed a man in it. Gene Kelly had sang and danced in it.

But those were nothing like this.

This is something to be feared and hidden from. So she does, plastering herself against the one thing she knows will keep her safe. One arm is around her, loose so she can bolt if she wants to, the fingers of the other smoothing out her nightmare-tangled hair.

“You have never seen it rain before?”

She shakes her head ‘no’, face in his shirt and the deep breath she takes smells like leather and rust.

“Come see,” he says into her hair.

So she follows him down the stairs to the front door, flinching into his side when the thunder cracks. He opens the door, and it hits her in the face, wild and beautiful and so _dangerous._

She shrinks back to get away from it because it's all too much.

“Sit and watch. It is nothing to be afraid of.”

So she obediently sits in the doorway, him behind her, giving her plenty of space, but she nestles her back into his chest because it feels safer.

Charon tells her about the rain.

How the Wasteland seasons have changed from four to two, how she had only seen the dry season, the season where the rain won’t come for months, but that the rainy season is here now, and how it will get cold and wet. How sometimes in between the two, the sky almost shatters with lighting but won’t bring a drop of rain, or how every once in a great while, it will rain quiet and steady for a week straight. Tells her how you can measure the distance of a storm by how far apart the lightning and the thunder are. How the lightning can cook trees from the inside out or make new rock when it strikes sand. How the water can race down gullies in a flood or stand in puddles where the ground irradiates it and how a few days after a big storm, ghouls like to take their boots off and dip their bare feet in because it feels nice.

“Put your hand out,” he says, but she shakes her head because it's too savage, too strange, like touching stars or eating wind. It’s simply not a thing to be done.

“If Odysseus can sail through storms, you can get a little rain on your hand,” he says, and she supposes he's right.

He takes her wrist, turns it underside up, and then it's raining on her. It lands on her skin, the drops running together to pool in the tiny divots her palm and fingers make,overflowing and sliding down her wrist to drip off her elbow and she wonders at it.

They sit there, hands out in the rain, and she can see _everything._ His big fingers under her small ones, the way the drops run rivulets down their shins to the fine bones that stand out on the tops of their bare feet and disappear between their toes, the way the sky splits to let the lightning out, how she can see each individual drop as they pass in front of the dim city lights. Smells the smell of water on dust and dust tamped into soil and soil driven into mud, hears the patter and rattle of it on the metal roof, the sluicing sound as it runs off the eaves, the paper-quiet rustle of it against her skin.

Hears how the rain and the thunder and the air in their lungs become the only sounds left in a world that keeps trying its damndest to die.

So they sit there and breathe together, watching the rain and listening to everything the world has to say. She leans back into the protective shell his arms and legs make around her and he winds his fingers through her hair. His arms are beautiful, really. In a ‘man’ sort of way, though. She likes how thick his wrists are, likes how they can tear a door off its hinges or stitch her up. Likes how they can beat someone’s face in or hold blonde babies while they sleep. She puts her fingers on the wrist she likes so much, and he doesn’t seem to mind, only takes a little bigger breath that she can feel against her back. Lucky pets the small divot-y spots his bones and tendons make with her thumb like she had when he was scared of his memories at Our Lady Hope, and she’s pretty sure she loves him, in one way or another.

But finally, the world holds no more secrets for her in its rain, and she gets so sleepy her eyes start to close and she jerks awake the way you do when your body is exhausted but your brain knows it’s not in a sleeping-place yet.

“You should get some rest,” he says, so quiet, like he’s still listening because the rain might have secrets just for him.

“Just a little longer? Please?”

“As you wish,” he says, fingers still in her hair.

She must really fall asleep this time, because now she’s in her bed, blanket pulled over her and a shadow filling the doorway.

So she asks the question she's been wanting to ask again ever since she almost died, because maybe the answer has changed.

“Are you happy?”

Charon says nothing, quiet and tall, eyes glowing like they always do in the dark as they catch every bit of light they can grab.

“Perhaps."

 

**********

 

_“Rome!”_

He bolts upright from where he had been sleeping next to her - face in her hair and arm over her like he always ended up in his sleep - but with a wide-eyed, hunted look. His one arm is around her tight enough to crush and the other is searching for his rifle that’s nowhere near.

“Hey! It’s okay! I just wanted to tell you it's raining.”

He calms down with a few owlish blinks and plants a kiss on her bare shoulder.

“Good to know. Next time, maybe don’t scare me outta my own skin, though.”

“Sorry.”

“No sorries. Wanna go look? Sounds like it's comin’ down pretty good.”

“Let’s. The first rain is always the best.”

They go out the back, even though there's no view except the city wall, but Rome’s got that look in those dark brown eyes that Moira loves so much, the look that starts that strange heat thrumming low in her belly, the one that says the only view he wants to see is _her._

He follows, hands on her hips and when his fingers run along where the sharp bones jut out, the thrumming gets fierce.

They stand just outside the door - close enough to feel the rain’s breath on her face, but far enough to keep under the eave -  listening to the rain and smelling the season change. Rome had told her this was the best time, still hot, but not miserably cold yet. Moira puts her hand out and laughs as she catches the big fat drops in the palm of her hand. The water is seeping under her bare feet. Bare everything, really, because it had been way too hot to sleep in anything.

Rome had thought she was nuts at first. Said, ‘what if something happens and you're stumbling around naked?’

‘You don’t like me naked?’ she’d asked, prowling towards him on her hands and knees from the foot of the bed to where he was propped up reading a book.

That was the last time he said a word about it and more often than not, ended up sleeping with nothing on, too.

And just like then, he lifts her hair out of the way and kisses the back of her neck like every part of her is perfect to him. And she knows he thinks so because he had spent the whole afternoon after their first time cataloging and coding each and every one, apologizing and promising he’d never make her hurt like that again. It hadn't been all that bad, really. More surprising than anything. But then again, she hadn’t really known what to expect. Definitely hadn’t expected _him._

His fingertips are on her sides, running along her ribs and hips, and the way they move across her skin with the rain sets the thrumming into an ache.

Moira had never realized this was what it could be. She’d just always been too _busy._ Too busy to think about men or even women, and she knew she was insufferably weird. People always held weird at arm’s length, like it might rub off on them. So eventually, she stopped trying. And it had been easy to focus on her work and easier still to get lost in it, get so lost she would sometimes forget to eat or sleep. But this - him - it's something good to get lost in.

And when he takes her face in his hand and tilts her head to the side, it’s more than good. He puts his teeth on the little spot under her jaw, right where the jugular is, and she loves how it makes her knees go weak.

Moira loves everything about him. How he growls a little into her neck in a way that makes her feel small, but in the best way possible. She loves how he had been so soft with her at first, making sure to show her just exactly what her own body could do, made her understand that she could ask for whatever she wanted and he would give it.

And right now, she wants him. But she always does. There's always something new to discover, something new to try. New things, like making love in the rain.

Moira can’t help the sigh when his fingers skim along her collar bones and isn’t too surprised at the needy mewl when he fills a rough palm with her left breast. She’d always hated them. Thought they were in the way, always a nuisance and not really good for much, but when he rolls the peak of one between his fingers just hard enough to make a good hurt, Moira decides they might be good for something after all.

Rome seems to think so, too. He loves to tease her like this, to see how high he can get her before she falls apart.

And they had both discovered that she could fly if pushed hard enough.

He trails kisses down her chest, along her belly, nipping a little at one of the hip bones he likes so much, and then before she can say anything, he has one of her thighs flung over his shoulder and looks up at her with those pretty brown eyes.

“What do you want?” she asks in a way that's more demanding than asking, but Moira knows this is just a game they play, and while it was hard at first, it's becoming her favorite.

He smiles but says nothing, taking a hold of her hips to get to her center, but she has two hands full of his hair so they're at a stalemate.

“Use your words,” she teases, tightening her grip on his hair. “Now, tell me what you want.”

“You,” he says, but that answer isn't good enough and they both know it.

“Try again,” she demands, pushing him back until her foot is on his shoulder and in a position to kick him backwards.

Rome looks up at her like she might be something more than human, like something out of a storybook, heat in his dark eyes. He takes her foot and nips and licks at the ankle, up her calf, along the backs of her knees, each searing kiss punctuated by the words she had demanded.

“I want...to taste you. Make you come until you can’t.”

It’s a good answer, and the look on his face says he knows it because he gives her an absolutely _naughty_ grin before pinning her up against the wall with his hands and doing exactly that.

 

**********

 

It's finally raining and Nova hates it.

Oh, she likes how it cools everything down and lets Walter stop bitching about not having enough water stored in the tanks for all her baths. Because come on, nobody wants a stinky whore, and she _loves_ baths, but she still hates the rainy season and it's not the cold or the wet or the thunder or the lightning.

It's the mud.

It's everywhere. So much mud, there's different kinds of it. Thick mud, thin mud, black mud, red mud, slimy mud, grainy mud, radioactive mud, mud with brahmin shit mixed in. Mud so oily it traps whole caravans for days, mud noxious enough to kill any bird stupid enough to land in it.

And it gets in and on everything. The floor, the walls, the bar, the chairs, her boots, her stockings - it even ends up in her bed sometimes. It doesn't matter what she does, it always gets in.

Nova wants a hit of Jet so bad she can taste it. But she won't, damn it. And she can't go wake Gobbie up every time she gets the shakes. So she stands at the open door and eyes the storm with no small amount of hate.

But Lucky had read things about rain. Lucky was always reading, and the things she read out loud were _beautiful,_ so beautiful they made Nova’s heart race. She can barely remember any of the words now, and it stings. Stings that she’s too stupid to read it for herself. It stings that of the entire, gorgeous thing she can only remember something about a ‘dark door’ and ‘lightning on the sky’. About eyes saying more and something forgotten in the rain.

And then Nova is _angry_. Furious at the rain and the mud, at the world and all its rotten people, at life and how it's treated her. She strides through the door and into the storm, gripping the railing with both hands, and growls that her fingers don’t make a dent in the metal. So she stands there in the rain and just screams, hurling insults at the sky as it thunders back in her face. It taunts her, tells her just how small and stupid and worthless and weak she is, so she screams louder until tears mix with the rain and her voice is gone.

Sinking to her knees, she tilts her head up to the sky, lets the rain beat down on her face and well up in her eyes, lets it plaster her hair to her head and run down in streams until the thin robe is soaked through and her teeth chatter with shivering. But she won't leave. To leave would be to lose to the storm, to the world, and she might be a shit person, but at least she's a fighter.

But it wins. It always wins no matter how hard she fights, and she's reminded why it's just easier to give up, safer to just forget it all in a haze of Jet, simpler to use her body like so many caps because it's always there.

Hands are on her shoulders now, big ones, almost fever-hot. They help her up off the decking and Nova knows who they belong to.

“Why’re you always so good to me?” she asks into the rain.

“Because I love you.”

She knows she shouldn’t. That this is too much too soon, but the rain doesn’t care and the world doesn't care either. And Nova’s so sick of waiting for something good to happen. She _needs_ this, needs someone to need her back, to want her for more than what she's used to selling.

She turns and gets up on her tippy toes, and looks at him, really _looks._ Looks at his weird eyes that aren’t weird to her anymore because they look like home. Puts a hand on his chest, notices how his wet t-shirt clings to the muscle that feels almost springy, how the skin of his cheek feels rough under the thumb of her other hand, like running your fingers along a fine-grained rock, smooth but not. Notices the soundless sigh when she moves her fingers along his jaw and down his neck.

“Nova. You don’t have to. If you don't want to. Not ever.”

“I know,” she says. “But I want to. Can I?”

He nods once, and when she kisses him, it's...Nova doesn’t know what it is, exactly.

But what she does know, is that it's _good._

Real good.

He’s got one hand on her hip, loose, like he'd let her go if she wanted him to, but the other one, it's soft, holding her face like it might be worth something, and then the words come back in a jumbled flood.

 

 _I thought I had forgotten,_  
_But it all came back again_  
_Tonight with the first spring thunder_  
_In a rush of rain._  
  
_I remembered a darkened doorway_  
_Where we stood while the storm swept by,_  
_Thunder gripping the earth_  
_And lightning scrawled on the sky._  
  
_The passing motor buses swayed,_  
_For the street was a river of rain,_  
_Lashed into little golden waves_  
_In the lamplight's stain._  
  
_With the wild spring rain and thunder_  
_My heart was wild and gay;_  
_Your eyes said more to me that night_  
_Than your lips would ever say. . . ._  
  
_I thought I had forgotten,_  
_But it all came back again_  
_To-night with the first spring thunder_ _  
_ In a rush of rain.

 

**********

 

The first rain marks both a beginning and an end for Lucas Simms, and he doesn't know whether to love it or hate it.

_Be good, Lucas. Always be good._

It was the last thing she had told him before bleeding out on the bed they had shared for years. So much blood. An amount you knew meant death.

Collette had stayed long enough to hold her new child to her chest. He’d cried a little, but then was quiet, like he knew something important was about to happen. She gave him his blessing, told him he was beautiful, and she'd been right.

And then she died while it stormed like she had lived - loud, fast, and with no regrets.

“Dad?”

“Hey, buddy. You okay?”

“It’s raining,” he says, voice heavy with sleep, so like and unlike his momma’s.

“Yeah. Sure is.”

Harden Simms, his perfect boy, the only thing Lucas has left of his wife, curls up next to him on the couch.

“Tell me about Mom,” he asks without asking, chin on his knees and hugging them into his chest.

Every year they have this conversation, every first rain. It had started when he was tiny, with a curious ‘daddy sad?’ and little fingers pulling Lucas’ hands away from his face when he had been just so _lost._ When the weight of responsibility for another soul, all alone, was finally heavy enough to crush. But every year a few more stories would find their way out from where Lucas kept them locked away like treasures, and every year they hurt just a little less to tell.

“Collette. Your momma. She was...somethin’ else. Came from waaay down south. ‘Florida’, they call it. Wet and swampy. Full of monsters. And you wanna know why she came all the way up here?”

“Why?” Harden asks with his momma’s shining eyes, like he hasn’t heard this story or any of the others enough times to memorize every word.

“She got bored. Can you imagine? Traveling hundreds of miles just to see something new.”

“What did she look like?”

“She was a knockout. At least, I sure thought so. Tall as me. Always wore her hair in a braid. Had eyes just like yours. I see her in them all the time. And the way you laugh? Sounds just like her.”

“What else?”

“Let’s see. She carried the biggest knife I ever saw. Crack shot with a pistol, too. Oh, and smart. So smart, smarter than me for sure.”

“How did you meet?”

Almost every year Harden asks this question. That and ‘how was I born?’ But every year, Lucas had put it off. Too violent, he’d thought. But looking at his son’s face that’s lost almost all its baby fat and thinking to the previous afternoon when he had taught him to shoot, Lucas knows it’s time. He remembered how Harden had stood tall and took the recoil of the big rifle like a champ, how he'd been so focused and calm and had listened - really _listened_ \- better than some grown men.

“Alright. You’re old enough. I'm gonna tell you some things. But before I do, I want you to listen real good and understand what I’m sayin’, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Everybody, and I mean _everybody_ , can change. Some people are bad. Always will be, but only because they don't want to change. But if they want to be better, and they want it bad enough? They can be a whole new person. You understand?”

“I understand.”

“Good. Because your momma...well, she wasn’t always good. She was never bad just to be bad, but she was wild when she was young. Did what it took to take care of herself. I won't lie to you, Harden. She was a killer for hire. And she was good at it. Real good. That's how we met. She tried to kill me, and I tried to kill her, too.”

“So you fought?”

“Yep.”

“Who won?”

Lucas barks a laugh and smiles. “Oh man, buddy. Neither of us. We tore each other to bits. Both of us nearly died. I shot her a couple times and she gave me this for my trouble.”

Lucas pulls up his shirt to show Harden the long, deep scar along his stomach that his wife had given him.

“Wow.”

“Wow is right. She nearly gutted me. We were both a mess, out in the middle of nowhere. Low on supplies - hardly any ammo, no stimpaks - we were both in a jam.”

Lucas remembers it all like it was yesterday.

_“Hey, Cowboy?” she calls over the concrete slab she’s hiding behind. Her voice, when not dishing out curses and taunts, is kinda pretty. Low and slow with a drawl Lucas had never heard before._

_“Yeah?”_

_“You sure you wanna keep playin’ this game?”_

_“Not really,” he says, and he means it. They’d been hunting each other for the better part of a week now, and he can’t remember a time he had been so exhausted. “You?”_

_“I believe I've had enough fun for today. Your guts still in?”_

_“Barely. How’s your leg looking?”_

_“I’ll live. Maybe. Thirsty as hell, though.”_

_“Trade you stitches for some water.”_

_“How can I trust you?” she asks, all suspicious._

_He just laughs and tosses a bottle of halfway clean water that she catches midair._

_“I’m tired,” he tells her. “Aren't you?”_

_“More than you know,” she says, grimacing as she stands up and limps a few steps. He’d caught her good in the thigh and shoulder, and it’s starting to show. He stows his rifle and she holsters her pistol,  like that’s supposed to make a difference. Lucas grins because he knows she could draw her knife quick as thought and throw it just as fast. She grins right back because she knows it, too._

“We called a truce. Patched each other up. I told her she should get a better boss. She decided that was a fine idea and joined the Regulators.”

Harden looks at him with big eyes. “The Regulators,” Harden says soft and quiet, like saying the name of something dangerous that’s always listening. “Mom was a killer. But so were you.”

“Yeah, buddy. I was. Still am if I need to. But I killed bad people. Like the people that hurt Maggie. Your momma killed anybody and everybody. Whoever she got paid to kill, she did. It took time, but she changed after that. Pointed her gun in the right direction. Always wanted to know what they’d done to deserve it. Sometimes, she'd say no and wouldn’t take the job. And I was so proud of her for that. But she really changed when she found out she was gonna have you.”

“How?”

“She quit. And for her to quit the only thing she’d ever known? That takes guts. It drove her crazy to sit still like that, but for you, she'd have done anything.”

Harden looks away and to the floor. “Did she regret it?”

“No. Never. She wanted you so bad. I did too. Thought we couldn't have kids. Not everyone can, you know.  Tried for years, but… nothing. She threw herself into work, her way of grieving, I guess. But the minute she knew, boy howdy. I’d never seen her more happy.”

“And I killed her.”

Lucas’ heart breaks because it's both true and isn’t.

“Your momma had you in a rainstorm. Craziest one I’d ever seen. We knew having a baby was dangerous, but she didn't care. When you were born and she knew you were safe and healthy...Harden, the look on her face, I’ll never forget it. She wasn’t scared, wasn’t sad, just...peaceful. Like she'd spent her whole life looking for something and found it when she saw you.”

“She loved me, and she didn't even know me yet?”

“Oh yeah. She held you, named you Harden Thomas Simms, told you you’d be strong and kind because there’s strength in kindness. Then she was gone. I miss her every day. But she gave me you, and that’s the best gift I’ll ever get.”

Harden thinks about that the way older kids do - real hard with every little brain cell going a mile a minute.

“Strength in kindness. I like that. It's...good.”

_Be good, Lucas. Always be good._

“Yeah. It sure is.”

 

**********

 

Lucky and Charon go visit Gob and Nova for their ‘grand opening’, an hour or two before they actually open.

The bar is (and Lucky is pretty sure no one has ever used this word to describe a bar) _gorgeous_. The first time she had visited, it was clean, sure, but now?

It's somewhere she'd actually want to hang out. Even Charon looks impressed, which in itself is no small miracle. Gobbie had spent the money left in Moriarty’s rather bloated account books to buy new tables and chairs, ones without blood stains and puke-smell. Everything gleams and there are string lights of pink, blue, and white everywhere, new posters on the walls, and the bar top had been repainted. But best of all, there’s a brand new sign out front.

‘Gob’s Hideaway’.

And the owner of said ‘hideaway’ is absolutely lit up like a Christmas tree. He’s never looked more sure of himself, and it sits good on him. Like this was his place all along.

There’s a _drink list_ for chrissakes, things Lucky's never even heard of, new things he’s just thought up and named after his favorite people.

“What the hell’s a ‘Lucky Charm’?”

“It's Nuka-Cherry and rum. It’s sweet, but it’ll sneak up on ya.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. I got lots. Let’s see, there’s the ‘Supernova’, the ‘Mad Scientist’, the ‘Boatman’, the ‘Dirty Dog’, the ‘Roamer’, and the ‘Regulator’. That last one’s more of a hangover cure than a boozy drink, but it's still a good one for day drinking. Oh hey, my first batch of fruit liquor just finished this morning, too. It’s just gotta cool for another couple hours but then you can have a ‘Carol’s Crown’. Nova said we should bottle it. She wants to try beer next. She's got some pretty good ideas for what to use instead of hops, and she says it’ll be a hell of a lot easier than making whiskey. I haven't got the barrels for that. If only somebody would take a trip to that place out east, Kentucky or whatever, I could get barrels, but they’d have to be real heavy. I dunno how you’d get them back here - hey, don’t cry! Maybe I can figure out a way to make my own barrels-”

Lucky _is_ crying. She didn’t notice, but tears are running down her cheeks.

“Gobbie, I’m just so _proud_ of you.”

He's bashful all of a sudden. “I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this without you.”

“Well, I’m proud of you, anyway,” she says, wiping her eyes. “So what did Andy Stahl have to say about all this? He couldn’t have been happy.”

“Well, that’s the thing. He wasn’t. But Nova, she's somethin’ else. Lucky, she’s so _smart._ Had the idea to strike a bargain. We won’t serve any food, and we'll tell everybody to head over to the Lantern for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now that Leo’s cleaned up some, he’s gonna run a night shift for the late crowd. They’ll send everybody to us for booze and beds. Works for everybody that way.”

Nova comes down the stairs, and she's gorgeous. Her eyes are brighter and the dark circles are fading.

She looks _happy_.

“Well, if it isn’t my pinch of sugar and pound of salt! I’ll let you guess which one is which.”

“I'm the sugar,” Lucky whispers to Charon behind her hand.

“Of course you are,” Charon tells her matter of factly.

“Don’t be so sure!” Nova says grinning. “You can be pretty salty, too, chicky.”

“Only when you make me. So, you got a drink named after you, huh?”

“Yep. I’m gonna be famous. Mutfruit and vodka. Real pretty purple color.”

“What’s in the ‘Boatman’?”

“Dash of punga fruit nectar and whiskey. It's, um, kinda sour,” Gob says, looking at Charon sidelong like he's trying to decide how much trouble he's in.

Maybe a little because Charon looks appalled. “You would ruin good whiskey with _juice?”_

“Whadda ya take me for, a raider?!” Gobbie almost growls, just as offended. “Only the Wasteland shit gets mixed. Top shelf is for drinking neat.”

“Thank God for small things,” Charon says under his breath.

There's a tentative knock at the door and it turns out to be Moira and Rome. They’re stuck so close together, water couldn’t get between them.

“We heard there was something new about this place. Decided to come take look,” Rome says.

Nova smiles and it lights up her face. “Well, you two are our first customers, and your first drinks are on the house. For always bein’ good to Gobbie and me.”

Gobbie is mixing drinks, just as happy as a ghoul bartender can be. “Got just the thing. See if you don't like it.”

The ‘Mad Scientist’ turns out to be vodka, ant nectar, and a healthy splash of Nuka-Cola Quantum that turns it a shocking shade of green, and Rome gets a ‘Roamer’ that he sniffs suspiciously.

“The fuck’s floatin’ in here?”

Moira backhands him on the shoulder with about enough force to make fine china laugh at her. “Just drink it!”

He takes a cautious sip and his face changes into something slightly surprised and a little confused.

“Hey, that's pretty good. What's in there?”

“Rum with a little bit of melon and crushed mint. That stuff grows wild all over.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

And then it's time to open. Lucky and Charon sit at a small table and just watch for a while, her nursing a ‘Lucky Charm’ and Charon drinking _plain_ whiskey, thank you very much.

 _Everybody_ comes in. Townspeople with addresses, drifters, traders - even Professor Cromwell and his a gaggle of parishioners, not to drink of course, but simply to wish success to the ‘Blessed Ones’. Charon, much to his chagrin, is included in that heavenly host.

“These people are insane,” he says softly into her ear so as not to be overheard, and Lucky decides he has _got_ to stop doing that because her face is getting hot and she's pretty sure it’s not from the alcohol.

“Yeah, but they're a real happy sort of insane.”

Nova is flitting all over the place, taking drink orders and caps, and Lucky wonders how she can possibly remember who ordered what, but she does, and all with hands busy expertly fending off a few wandering ones. One drifter in particular seems to have heard what her previous occupation was and supposes he is entitled to a preview.

“Nuh-uh,” she says, smiling with sharp teeth just barely covered. “I just bring the drinks, sweetie. Now take your fingers off or I’ll take one off for ya.”

The man backs off quickly enough, but as the night goes on, he decides to keep at it.

He catches her by the waist and pulls her into his lap, grabbing handfuls of whatever he can get a hold of. Lucky makes a move to beat his face in, but Charon lightly holds her wrist.

“Just watch a moment,” he tells her quietly, so she sits, him with his hand still on her wrist, thumb making one slow stroke along the fine bones there as if to reassure her that he won’t let anyone hurt her or her friends.

In addition to reassurance, Lucky also gets goosebumps.

“Got fifty caps here,” the man sneers into Nova’s ear. “Wanna play?”

Nova rolls her eyes at Lucky but smirks like she couldn’t care less. “Sure, baby. I’ll play.”

She snaps her head back in a reverse headbutt with enough force to knock out teeth, and quick as a snake she's up and facing him. The man stands and tries to throw a punch at her, but he’s either way too slow or Nova’s way too fast, because with a fluid sidestep, she wraps her hands around the back of his head and drives his face into her knee. And then, just to add insult to injury, she gives him a nasty snap kick to the groin and he's writhing down on the ground.

“Aww, don't wanna play anymore? That's too bad. I was just gettin’ started.”

Lucky whistles between her teeth.

Even Jericho, who had been sullenly sipping whiskey and grumbling about the crowds, the prices, and the fact that nobody would let him carry a tab, is a little taken aback. “Goddamn, Nova. You got mean.”

“Fuck you. Nobody gets to touch me like that. Not ever again.”

Jericho holds his hands up in surrender and goes back to his whiskey, sober enough to know she’d rearrange his face too and not think twice about it.

Gobbie is already around the bar, lead-filled bat in hand, and he looks _pissed_.

“We got a problem?”

Lucky hadn’t realized how big he could be. Not like Charon, but Gobbie - busted, broken-down, tired, little Gobbie - had never been ‘little’.

He just hadn’t ever stood up before.

But he is now, and he’s pushing six foot and angry.

“I asked if we got a problem,” he says again to the two tablemates of the poor bastard with his balls currently somewhere up near his liver.

“Nope.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Nova, you alright?” Gob asks.

“Just fine, Gobbie. Haul his ass outside for me, will ya? I don’t deal with sacks of shit anymore.”

“You got it.”

Gobbie takes the offender by the collar, and with an upper body made tough from almost unceasing work, drags him out. Judging from the racket of thumps, groans, and clangs of flesh and probably cranium against the metal decking, Gobbie had thrown him down the catwalk and he has rolled to a stop somewhere in the vicinity of Billy Creel’s doorstep.

And with the bar suddenly quiet and the door flung open, Lucky hears a shouted “Get off my doormat, ya filthy hobo!” from Billy’s living room where he’s left the door open to let in some night breeze.

Time, which had been so tense as to be frozen, restarts with a rush, and the whole bar breaks out into hoots and hollers, everyone drinking and talking and a group of traders starting a drinking song that Lucy West dances to.

Simms is just hanging out in a corner, sipping his complimentary ‘Regulator’, which he tips toward a grinning Nova like a salute.

“Well. I'm not even sure what to say,” says Rome.

“Gosh golly, she’s pretty,” Moira says dreamily, pupils blown wide and weaving a bit on her barstool. It's apparent she's had two ‘Mad Scientists’ too many, because she’s trying to feel up Rome and stare at what even Lucky has to admit is a gorgeous, pink-cheeked Nova.

“Pull yourself together, woman!” he says, only half-heartedly batting her wandering hands away.

“Pull _your_ -self together...man,” she retorts drunkenly.

“Yep. Come on, honey. Time to go.”

Moira sighs happily and wriggles into his side. “Mmmhmm. Go anywhere with you.”

“G’night, sugar,” Nova says to a blissed-out Moira who is being half-carried by an exasperated Rome, but it's the kind of exasperated that says he doesn’t mind it one little bit.

“Rome, did you hear?! She called me _sugar!”_ Moira says, hands pawing at his chest again.

“Yeah, I heard,” Rome huffs, giving Nova a dirty look.

Nova just laughs and waggles her eyebrows when Moira clamors up and settles herself reverse piggyback style. He grunts a little under her weight but has a face that says this might happen more often than not.

“Don’t worry,” Moira’s tells Rome in a voice that means to tell a secret, but the booze has turned up the volume too high for secrets. “You’re just as pretty. You’re _man-pretty.”_

Nova laughs and it sounds like smoke. “She's either gonna tear him apart or fall asleep before they even get home.”

“I never knew the wrenchie had it in her,” says a voice behind Lucky’s left shoulder. It's a woman’s voice, but rough, and it takes a moment to place.

“Silver! What’re you doing out here?!”

It is Silver, and she’s looking like she might have cut back on the chems. She’s still got that wild look in her eye, but that’s likely something she’ll never lose.

“Just heard some good news and decided to come see what all the fuss was about. Everybody’s buzzin’, ya know. Traders as far as Canterbury heard about it. Wondered if it was gonna be any better than Moriarty’s piss-water.”

Nova doesn’t seem to know what to think about Silver showing up out of the blue, so she puts her ‘sleepy-whore’ face back on, the one that had protected her for years.

The two women seem to size each other up, and Lucky wonders if she really will have to break up a fight. But Silver flashes a smile, a real one, and while you can tell it's there only rarely, it looks good on her. “Nova, doll, you got a nice place here. I'm proud of ya.”

“Well, thank you. But it's Gob’s place. He just lets me stay and work.”

“And he’s lucky to have ya. Now, if you’ll excuse me, that Lucy West is lookin’ cute as a little button I’d like to push.”

She saunters off, _stalks_ really, and the poor, defenseless Lucy West doesn’t know what hit her.

“Silver’s gonna eat her alive,” Lucky says to Charon, quiet though, so nobody else will hear.

It’s only when he just about chokes and almost snorts his whiskey out his nose that Lucky realizes exactly what kind of double entendre she’s accidentally made.

“Oh. Shit. Well, I stand by it.”

He shakes his head. “You are likely not wrong.”

 

***********

 

Lucky has never been abducted before, and in the hazy stupor she finds herself in, she's pretty sure that ‘abducted’ is the right word. ‘Kidnapped’ sounds too tame, and ‘stolen’ would imply that she is a thing and not a person, which is also not true.

But as the ropes that tie her hands behind her back bite into the tender flesh and someone shoves her hard enough to make her stumble and almost fall, they don't seem to have gotten the memo.

She had just gone to pee.

‘I’ll be right back,” she had told Charon with a lopsided smile and a squeeze to his wrist. He had looked at her closely and simply told her to ‘be careful’.

As if going to the ladies’ room might be fraught with danger.

Lucky sighs because he was right. One minute she was coming down the stairs, the next there was a pinch at her neck, and then the world had melted into black.

Now she's scuffling along somewhere in the Wasteland with a bag over her head and she's drowning in Med-X. She can feel that light, loopy feeling in her fingers, the way nothing matters even though it should. How calm the world is in the dark, how thin the veil between reality and whatever plane of existence she's landed in like a fly stuck in sap. And it's still raining. She can feel it on her skin, how it soaks her tank top and squelches under her boots.

There’s voices, one on each side and one behind. On her right, one is gravelly and rough, like Charon’s, but definitely not. The one on the left is male, but it’s light and cracks sometimes, like he might be young. And the third is surprisingly silent, but when he does talk, he sounds like, well, just a regular guy.

She laughs giddily to herself. Some witness she’d be. _“I saw it all, Officer!” “What did he look like, you ask?” “Oh, you know, just a regular guy…”_

“And you're sure she didn't have it on her? Nowhere?” Gravel-Guy asks.

“Unless she swallowed it. I looked everywhere. Even looked in the lining of her jacket,” Regular-Guy answers.

“I knew it was bullshit. No piece of paper keeps a merc that loyal. Unless she's fuckin’ him.”

“Not a chance,” Young-Guy scoffs. “No offense.”

“Eh. None taken,” Gravel-Guy says. “But you never know. Chicks are weird.”

Apparently, thinking about all the weird things chicks could get up to is enough to cause words to be impossible, because silence stretches out now, only broken by the squish of boots in mud.

“That syringe worked good, though,” Young-Guy finally says, like he's touched on something in his imagination that he would rather said chicks _didn't_ get up to.

“It was my idea, so if course it worked good,” Gravel-Guy replies.

“I really thought it'd be harder than that. Wasn’t she supposed to be some kind of badass?”

“I'm thinking all those stories are just more bullshit,” Gravel-Guy says. “Nobody just _disappears_ in the dark. And guys say she's got a tamed wolf, but I never seen a real wolf and I turned ghoul in ‘75.”

“That makes you how old?” Young-Guy asks.

“Old as God’s address, and I’m tellin’ you, there's no such thing as wolves.”

Regular-Guy growls. “Don't underestimate her. It’s the body count that matters. Nobody that goes after her ever comes back. Every ambush party, every mission leader, even Mcaffery and Spoon, all dead. And not just dead. Fucking _destroyed.”_

“Yeah, but she had that big-ass shuffler with her. No offense...” Young-Guy says.

Gravel-Guy just laughs. “None taken. But the next one’s gonna cost ya.”

“She probably just sat back and let him do all the work. I heard he's a fuckin’ demon. It’s him we should have offed.”

“Hah. So you want to drag that big bastard across the Wastes instead of this little thing? At least she's nice to look at. Real nice,” Gravel-Guy says approvingly, and Lucky feels a something rough run down her bare arm.

“Knock it off,” Regular-Guy growls, slapping away what she supposes is Gravel-Guy’s hand. “You heard what the boss said, same as me. ‘Pris-fucking-stine’.

“Dunno why he gets to have all the fun.  It's not like he does any of the work.”

“Don’t let him hear you say that or you won't last long,” Young-Guy warns.

“Yeah,” Gravel-Dude snorts, “and it won't be because he got up off his ass to do it himself, either. He’ll send Sixer to shoot me in the head.”

“Or Eli to put a mine in your bunk,” Regular-Guy says sagely.

“Shit. Didn't think about that. That’d be a hell of a way to go. I like Sixer’s way better. Livin’ life and then... _poof_. Go right into the dark.”

It suddenly occurs to Lucky that it might be better to see than to not.

“Hey, guys. Speaking of dark, I can't see a thing.”

“Shut up, cunt,” Gravel-Guy says, and there's another pinch at her neck.

“Chivalry is dead,” she grumbles drunkenly.

The world gets even darker - fuzzier around the edges until it’s all just one big scream sent out into the void that doesn't bother coming back at all. Well, fuck it, she decides, and lets her legs go out from under her.

“Stand up!” someone yells, yanking on her arm.

“Nope. Too tired.”

Then there’s a punch to her gut and now she's puking and laughing at the same time. It doesn’t hurt. Nothing hurts because it's all so damn funny. Someone pulls up the hood just enough that she can see a pair of boots, so the next time she heaves, she makes sure it’s a real good one. Right on the shins.

That earns her a blow to the face, and she's pretty sure her nose is properly broken because blood comes streaming out like a faucet to spatter on the ground.

“Hey!” Regular-Guy yells. “Stop it! What part of ‘pris-fucking-stine’ did you not understand?”

Now they’re arguing with each other and she's on her knees, laughing her head off while choking on her own blood and upchuck.

 _“For your hands are stained with blood,”_ she wheezes, _“your fingers with guilt, your lips speak lies and your tongues mutter wickedness.”_

“What the fuck she just say?”

“You gave her to much. She's gone batshit.”

“I did not! She must be a lightweight.”

“She’s heavier than she looks.”

“I meant the drugs, idiot.”

“Watch who you're callin’ idiot, Dr. Dumbass!”

_“And the transgressors shall be destroyed and the future of the wicked shall be cut off.”_

“I don't care what you have to do, just make her be quiet!”

“Yeah. She's givin’ me the willies.”

“Fine, but you'll have to carry her.”

_“Woe to the wicked, for all will go ill for them and what their hands have done will be done to them.”_

“I don't care if I have to carry her home between my teeth, just shut her up!”

“He’s coming for you,” she sings chirpily. “He’s coming, and he’s gonna be _so mad.”_

“Come on, man. I can’t work like this.”

“So fucking _creepy_.”

“Alright, alright! Keep your pants on!”

_“The wicked are like a tossing sea, for as it can never rest, nor shall they-”_

Another pinch and Lucky’s world goes dark.

 

_**********_

 

It goes like this for days. Maybe months or years. Who could be sure when time is stuck in such sticky sap? But what she does know is that it’s so soft - only muffled, underwater noises now.

Sometimes, voices with no words or words with no voices.

Water on her face that she licks off cracked lips because she's so thirsty, but even that craving is soft, nebulous and fuzzy in the back of her stuffed-animal brain. Is she thirsty because she is or simply because the rain thinks she should be?

The sound of her knees and the toes of her boots as they scrape smooth along the earth. Little twinges in her shoulders as her head lolls in a steady rhythm.

Sometimes the rhythm would stop and the world would stand still for a while. She would lay on her side and listen closely to the undertow sounds, try to hear the secrets in their wordless song. But one thing never changes.

It’s dark. Always so dark.

 

**********

 

They've stopped.

Where, Lucky has no idea, but the Med-X is wearing off, and as the light, loopy feeling in her fingers leaves, it's replaced by the tingle of freed adrenaline.

She's sat in a heap - next to a fire, she thinks, because one side of her is hot and steaming and the other is cold and wet. Her shoulders are screaming, like they've been torqued and twisted, so she supposes they had to resort to dragging her when she went all rag-doll on them. The scent of freshly lit cigarette that wafts through the air says someone is awake and smoking. The hood is gone because she can feel raindrops on her forehead, but her eyes are still covered. If she goes out of her head and holds her own breath, she can hear someone. Other-breaths, even and deep, like sleep or something close to it, not more than ten feet to her left. The third must be farther, maybe out on patrol.

That ‘Ant-Sight’ injection was one of the best pharmaceuticals she's ever had the honor of being shot up with.

A snore sounds to her left. A watch rotation, then. Smart. She shimmies and tests the rope on her wrists, but they’re swollen and the knots are tight.

“Leave it,” Gravel-Guy says quietly, like he doesn’t want to wake the other up.

“But I gotta pee.”

“So hold it.”

“Can’t.”

“For fucksakes, fine.”

A pause, a rustle, and three almost tiptoe-ing steps later, a boot nudges her thigh as the blindfold is ripped off.

“Get up,” Gravel-Dude growls softly, hauling her up by the rope on her wrists. It's almost shocking to see a ghoul as an enemy. She knew he was one - the voice had given it away - but it's still a bit of a shock. Every ghoul she's ever seen had been nice to her, and if not nice, at least not out for her blood. He's not too big, maybe a few inches taller than her. Nothing like Charon and she'd been sparring with him forever. The other guy is still rolled up in a blanket, snoring away.

Gravel-Guy takes her down the hill a ways, out of earshot, and that sends up another red flag. He's getting ready to do something he'd rather not have an audience for.

“You might have to untie one hand so I can get my pants -”

But nope. He's gone and done it for her.

“Hey!”

“What do you think I am, stupid?”

“No, just wouldn't mind some privacy.”

Gravel-Guy laughs at her, ugly and short, and it's then that Lucky understands that she’s in some deep shit with no way out.

“Oh, you're _embarrassed?_ Well, you better get it out of your system. Boss wants you for a pet. And if we do good getting you there, he promised us first dibs. I don't like my meat rancid, so first dibs is always something.”

“Ugh. No gentlemen left these days. What's the world coming to?”

He grabs her by the arm, hard enough to leave bruises, other hand wandering up her shirt. “Soft. Maybe I should just test you out. Don't want the boss getting bad merchandise.”

“Lemme pee first, or you'll be sorry.”

He looks at her like she couldn’t be any more vile, but something in her face must tell him it's not an idle threat.

“Hurry up. I’m already sick of this shit.”

“Hah! _You’re_ sick of it? It's not like I wanted to murder you all. Blow off their legs with mines or shoot their brains out their face, or let my friend break every bone until they scream for their mommy and beg to just die already-”

_Crack._

The backhand he gives her is more for show than anything else she thinks, because she's definitely had harder.

“Did you know I butchered three of your friends? They bawled like cattle. I painted my face with their blood _.”_

 _“Shut up!”_ he hisses, clocking her again, and this time it _does_ hurt, hard enough send her head whipping back. But she laughs to herself when she tastes blood on her tongue and imagines what a mess she must look like, busted-mouthed and bare-assed.

“Oh, and the sniper? I dug out his eyes with my thumbs and his blood told me all his secrets. And he sang and sang until he couldn't sing anymore.”

She has begun to sing, too, and can't remember when she started.

“You're crazy,” he whispers, eyes wide, like he's fascinated yet disgusted, but not so disgusted that he doesn’t start unbuckling his belt.

“That's fair,” she says quietly, but her mind is churning. Tactics, possible routes of escape, and with her wrists pinioned like they are, she's going to have to get in close, dangerously close.

He pulls down his pants a ways, and yep, that was something she _definitely_ didn't need to see, and then there’s a short struggle, her kicking and headbutting and snapping her teeth at whatever she could reach, but it's not a fair fight with both hands tied behind her back.

He takes her by the arms and throws her down into the mud and she hears a soft pop underneath her. That's not so bad, but she knows her shoulder’s either broken or dislocated.

And then the pain.

It's a pain like she's never experienced, even through the last dregs of Med-X. Not the worst - the broken hip takes the cake on that one - but Dad always told her having a separated shoulder was one of the most painful injuries someone could sustain.

But she knows how to use it now, how to make it work for her instead of against her. The hand over her mouth is all she could ask for and the flesh feels perfect as she snaps her jaws shut and wrenches her head to the side.

Even more perfect is the blood in her mouth that isn’t hers.

Grunting, he yanks his hand away, ripping the skin even further. The distraction is all she needs, so she gives it everything she has when she punches her knees straight up into his uncovered groin, just like Charon had taught her, and even as both she and her dislocated shoulder scream, she whips her hands over her boots and to the front.

She grins with blood on her teeth because now things are looking up. The tied wrists were a liability, but she uses the loose rope like a garrote, looping it around so that she has his neck in a noose.

The human neck is such a silly bit of anatomy. It houses so many important, fragile structures - the trachea, the carotids, the spinal cord sandwiched between those delicate seven vertebra. So many vital things in such a small, slender space.

And the flood of adrenaline has changed the pain into something else. Sublimated it into the pretty red-haze and siren violin-songs that both frighten and enthrall, and she lets the soft threads of it wind between her fingers. Distantly, she knows she's getting her face pummeled, and then a hand wraps around her throat and squeezes. She chokes out a laugh because it's too late for that now.

She's got a head start.

So she pulls for all she's worth. The world goes all spotty and black at the edges, but she knows she shouldn’t let go. Can’t let go, because if she does, she's dead.

A few more moments of struggle and it's all over with the slack in his hands and the rush of air to her lungs, but it's hard to let go, hard to quiet the violin-song and let the red threads slip away.

“You _bitch!”_

Young-Guy.

Lucky had forgotten all about him in the red-haze. And looking at the situation, it's not good. She tries to get her wrists untangled from the dead body that's sprawled over her like a blanket, but she had twisted the rope to get better leverage and it's good and stuck.

Also, there's a rifle butt coming at her face at a pretty quick clip, so she squeezes her eyes shut and braces for impact.

But the boom that cracks out isn’t from a gunstock pulverizing her face.

And as Young-Guy looks down at the gaping hole in his chest, he has a comically surprised look on his face, like he'd just discovered the key to multidimensional travel in the back of his refrigerator behind a jar of expired mayonnaise.

“Well, shit,” is all he gets out before dying while standing up.

Young-Guy falls into a mangled heap and Charon is behind him. Shotgun smoking in the damp air, he looks absolutely _livid,_ a vengeful demi-god sent to destroy the entire world and every living thing in it.

He’s so beautiful, Lucky is almost afraid of him.

“So,” she says, not sure what the right words are for this particular situation, “the bathrooms are more dangerous than I remember.”

He just looks at her and says absolutely nothing, breathing heavy and eyes burning with reflected campfire.

Maybe more wires have broken.

“You okay, big guy?”

He shakes his head minutely. “Yes-”

“ _Behind you!”_

Regular-Guy is coming in hot with a nail-spiked baseball bat, Dogmeat nipping at his heels. Dogmeat almost looks like he’s playing, slashing with his teeth and then twisting away, dipping and dodging away from the bat as he herds Regular-Guy into Charon.

Charon spins smooth like water, makes an agile duck to avoid the swing that would have taken his head clean off, and has his shotgun barrel nestled tightly into Regular-Guy’s gut. Dogmeat’s got a good grip on the back of a hamstring, growling and slavering like hell’s cutest demon, and Lucky couldn’t be more proud.

Regular-Guy doesn’t feel the same and takes an awkward swing.

“Do not hit the dog,” Charon says simply as he rips the baseball bat out of Regular-Guy’s grip with one hand and shoves the shotgun muzzle into his gut hard enough to bruise with the other. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Regular-Guy has to choose between being eaten alive or gut-shot, and wisely chooses to stay put. To his credit, Regular-Guy only howls a few times when Dogmeat happily gnaws on his leg.

“Shoo,” Charon says, and Dogmeat obliges with one last vicious slash of teeth, bounding up to Lucky and covering her face with a mixture of blood and slobber.

Charon marches Regular-Guy to the fire and motions him to sit. He apparently takes too long to comply so Charon sends an uppercut to his midsection that has enough force to lacerate a liver and Regular-Guy is now sitting. If noisily retching and choking can be called ‘sitting’.

Crouching quietly down next to her, Charon carefully rolls the body off and slices the rope away from her wrists where it had dug in.

“You should always leave yourself an out in hand-to-hand. You know this,” he tells her softly as he helps her up.

“I didn't think I’d make it that far. It was all or nothing- ah, shit! Careful, that arm’s no good.”

“Are you injured? Did anyone…harm you?”

“Not really. I mean, my face, and this shoulder’s outta joint-”

“Your pants…”

And then important facts - like how her pants are down around her ankles and that she looks like she’s been rubbing her bare ass in the mud - all come rushing back.

“I mean, he _tried,_ but-”

Charon growls an honest to goodness _growl_ and Lucky’s almost sad she killed Gravel-Guy first because Charon would have literally torn him apart.

“But I’m fine! Promise! Can’t seem to get these buttoned, though.”

Her fingers have swelled into sausages and fine motor movements are impossible. Plus this shoulder is absolutely _killing_ her.

He buttons them up for her and rearranges her shirt.

“This needs to be put back in before it begins to contract,” he tells her, soft fingers probing at the shoulder.

“Yeah. I know. Here, grab ahold.”

“It will be painful.”

“I know that, too. One, long, slow pull until it pops.”

He does and she shrieks, sharp and short, but the humerus slides back into its socket and thankfully, enough pain goes away that she can think straight. He makes her a sling out of the handkerchief that was her blindfold, relocates her nose, and cleans up her face.

“You are well, now?” he asks softly after administering a stimpak or two.

“More or less.”

“Good. Please rest here,” he tells her ominously, turning and stalking to Regular-Guy who had been trying to slither away into the dark. Dogmeat, lolling his tongue out with an open-toothed snap inches away from his face, is an excellent incentive to sit the fuck down and stay sat.

“But-”

“Do you want to end this?” Charon asks calmly.

“Well, yeah.”

“Then let me work. Unless you do not want to know who is sending these cockroaches to kill us both.”

“I’m not telling you anything!” Regular-Guy announces, and Lucky rolls her eyes because she's heard that before.

“I just meant you don't have to do anything you don't want to.”

He looks at a point somewhere above her head, fists clenching and releasing in an almost relaxing rhythm. So fascinating to watch the thick muscle in his arms leap-

“I need to,” he says quietly, almost desperately.

“Alright.”

And Lucky understands. Hadn’t she done the same? Listened to the songs their blood sang? Put her thumbs in a pair of eyes and still wanted more?

Charon gets to work and Lucky buries her face in Dogmeat’s fur.

The questions pound into her head, asked so smooth and calm, so at odds with the screams.

_“What is your designation?”_

_“Who is your superior?”_

_“Where is your base?”_

_“How many are you?”_

It goes on and on for what has to be hours. Finally, Charon gets the answers he wants and smiles.

“Do you know what she has done to deserve a contract out on her life?”

The man spits up blood and shakes his head no.

“You hunt, but do not know why?”

“They never tell us! Please-”

“Mistress?”

“Yeah?”

“Tell me exactly what they did to you, please. Leave nothing out.”

“Charon, I don't think-”

 _“Tell me,”_ he says, not raising his voice, but it still demands obedience and Lucky shivers, not because she's scared of him, but because she _likes_ it.

“Please,” he adds politely, so she does.

“They drugged me. Beat me until I puked. Broke my nose, I think. I don't know what they did while I was out. That guy told me his boss wanted me for a pet. Then he tried to rape me.”

“Did you hear that?” Charon asks the man.

The man quickly nods yes. “I didn't do it though.”

“No. You did not. But the one I require payment from is dead. And his debt has now fallen to you.”

“Please, just- what are you- Oh, God!”

“God is dead. He cannot collect your debt, so I will.”

“I told you everything!”

“You did,” Charon says calmly, tightening a belt into a tourniquet around the man’s right forearm and doing the same with the left, “But I am taking what touched her without permission. Both of them.”

Lucky never knew that a human could make those sounds. A few sawing slices and a rock used like a hammer to make the knife a hatchet, and both hands are...off. They lie there in the dirt, so strange because they aren't where they should be.  

And if she thought those screams were bad, the ones that he makes when Charon cauterizes the stumps with the end of a burning log are indescribable.

He finally passes out and Lucky can think again without all the screaming. But she's just so tired, so she sits and stares at nothing.

“Drink this,” Charon says, putting a bottle of water in her hands.

They shake and she can't get them to stop, can't even make them unscrew the cap, so he does it for her.

“When did you last eat?”

“Dunno. But I'm just… I guess I’m not really really hungry.”

“I am sorry. I should have had you turn around.”

“It's not that. Maybe all the drugs. Or other...stuff.”

“I see. You should still try.”

She feels like she might ralph if she sees food again, but as he sets a box of apples on her knee, she thinks she'd eat ten boxes because he'd been thinking about her.

“You remembered.”

“What?”

“The apples. You remembered they're my favorite.”

Charon whole face goes soft, a look Lucky’s only seen the night that it rained. “Oh. Yes. I thought...if I found you - no, _when_ I found you-”

Regular-Guy comes back to with a groan that scales up to a scream.

“Be quiet, or I will take something else.”

That threat is enough to turn the scream into a strangled whimper, but his panicked eyes say everything.

“Please, just kill me.”

“No. Your debt is paid. Now go.”

“Just...go?”

“Yes, go. You irritate me.”

Regular-Guy almost falls over himself to stand up and run.

“One more thing.”

“But you said-”

“Take these with you,” Charon takes a bootlace from Gravel-Guy’s corpse and ties the hands by the thumbs into a grisly necklace for the man to wear, “and tell Jabsco I will be there soon.”

 

**********

 

_If your right hand should cause you to sin, cut it off and throw it into the fire._

She's sick. So sick. Not physically sick. No, she's a monster, so much a monster, because she's _proud_ of him.

She had thought long and hard about what she would do if it had been Charon they had taken.

Lucky knows she's a monster because she would have kept the hands for herself.

 

**********

 

Now that he’s had time to think, Charon is furious with her, and Lucky isn’t sure why, but he hasn't talked to her the whole way home. And when they do get home, he barricades himself in his room.

She'll be damned if she lets those bastards turn her into a Med-X fiend, so she floods her system with Addictol, crosses her fingers and hopes for the best.

And now, she's wired for sound.

She tries her best to sleep, but her shoulder and face are throbbing and when she does nod off, she wakes up gasping and sweating because the girl on the mattress is back in her dreams.

  
_“Almost ended up like me, didn’t ya,” she says, smiling wide and sharp._

_“Yeah,” Lucky has to admit. “Almost.”_

_“I cried. Do you think you would have cried?”_

_“Maybe.”_

_“Well, next time, don't. They like it when you cry.”_

_“Next time?”_

_The girl on the mattress tsks through her grey teeth and nibbles at a fingernail that’s only hanging on by sheer spite._

_“There’s always a next time.”_

Lucky paces. Paces and prowls, and thankfully Wadsworth knows enough not to poke at a caged tiger. He wisely stays out of her way, busying himself with quietly cleaning the kitchen. Even Dogmeat flees and hides under her bed.

She knocks softly at Charon’s door, because she just can’t stand it anymore.

A few rustles of blankets and he’s there, filling the doorway. His hair is all stuck up in the back and good lord, he hasn’t got a shirt on. The bee on his shoulder flutters its wings at her when he crosses his arms.

“I’m sorry,” she says, even though she's not sure what for. Maybe for everything. Maybe for him having to put up with what she is.

“There is nothing to be sorry for,” he says, looking absolutely exhausted.

“Can I come in? You can keep sleeping. I just...I don't really want to be alone.”

“I see,” he says, quiet, but steps aside to let her in.

She's been in his room before, when she'd damn near murdered Nova for propositioning him - under her own roof, no less - but she'd been too worked up to really look around.

It's _clean._ Although, not how you might expect. It's clean, as in sanitized of anything personal. His emptied pack and boots are by the door, his shotgun leaned up against the head of the bed and that's it. Nothing else. Maybe he had tossed everything she had given him.

Well, except the slippers, those are tucked under the bed.

But she won't say anything now, not when he looks like he could sleep ten years and then ten more. She sits up at the foot of his bed, back against the wall and knees up into her chin.

“Just gonna sit here and think. Is that okay?”

“Yes,” he says grumpily, but gets under the blankets and stares up at the ceiling with his hands behind his head.

They stay like this for a while, her thinking and him staring.

“You should sleep,” she tells him quietly.

“You should stop thinking so loudly.”

She barks a laugh because it's probably true. “I’d sleep, but...I’d just have another nightmare.”

“I see. You could read. I would listen.”

“Alright. What should I read?”

“Something...small.”

It's not much to go on, but she knows what he means. Something small. Something about nothing. Something completely devoid of reason because all the world had gone mad anyway.

“Alright.”

She comes back with a book and settles in, thrashing and poking until she's comfortable with her knees over his.

_“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘if it has no pictures or conversations?’”_

 

_**********_

 

“Hey.”

Charon just gives a grumpy-sounding groan.

“Hey, Charon.”

More growly grump-groans.

“Hey. Are you asleep?”

An eye pops open to glare at her. “Not anymore. What do you need?”

“So, are you still mad at me?”

Both eyes are open now, he's sitting up, and _words,_ more words than she'd ever heard him speak at one time all come tumbling out like if they didn't escape he would explode.

“I am not ‘mad’ at you. I was...concerned. You were gone. I searched all of Megaton. The dog was not able to track your scent in the rain, though it tried. I saw your bootprints in the mud. They went for miles. I found your jacket ripped apart and thrown aside. Then there was blood spatter. Vomit. The footprints stopped and became scrape marks. I assumed the worst. Blunt trauma. Strangulation. But I still tracked you for two days. I hoped you would be alive, but perhaps they wanted your body as proof... but I would know. If my employer was dead, if... _you_ ...were dead, surely I would _know-”_

“Charon, it's okay-”

_“It is not okay!”_

He’s almost yelling, he's so worked up. “Then, I find you. Alive, but...mistreated. _And_ _you crack jokes!”_

“Well, I did just get done strangling a guy with my pants around my ankles, so that was something new…”

“Still with the jokes-”

“Because if I don't laugh, I’ll cry,” she says sharply, “and they like it when you cry.”

Charon passes a hand over his face like he's just so tired, and Lucky understands because she is, too.

“I failed you. Again.”

She shakes her head because he's nuts. “You found me. Took care of me. Made them all pay. That's not failing, big guy. That's _amazing.”_

“You should never have been lost in the first place. My other employers, I did not care if they lived or died, but you...this. What we are. Friends, as you say. It should not be allowed to continue.”

“Oh.”

“Please understand,” he says, talking to the ceiling and not to her at all, “I have outlived every single employer. Some I was more sorry to see die than others, but most I would have killed myself. Some, I did. Seeing you harmed was...painful.”

“So you’d rather live an empty life just to avoid a little pain?”

“Perhaps.”

“It takes balls to protect people you care about. But to know you might fail and still keep doing it anyway? That takes big brass ones.”

Charon says nothing, looking up at the ceiling and thinking hard.

“Do you really want to stop being friends?” she asks quietly, and she thinks she could do that for him. Be nothing but his boss. It’d hurt like kicked-in teeth, but she'd do it.

“No,” he says. “But this is something I have never done. I find it...difficult.”

“Do what you want. It's as simple as that.”

“Very well. But I would request something from you.”

“Of course.”

“Do _not_ leave my sight until this Talon Company business is concluded.”

“No arguments here. We’re really going, then?”

“They are a threat to your person. The contract demands they be dealt with, and I would certainly prefer it. And in my experience, you must cut the head off this snake.”

“Jabsco?”

“No. He is merely the neck. The person who put out the contract. They are the head. The last link. They and everyone in between must die.”

“You want war, then.”

Charon looks at her, eyes sharp and burning, and she recognizes that look. It's one of retribution and the kind of spine-tingling intensity that demands the spilling of blood.

“No. I want complete annihilation.”

 

**********

 

“Alright, Moira, let’s see what you got.”

Moira smiles her big, goofy, soft smile and Lucky loves it. Loves how sweet and chipper it always is, loves how it's never had its thumbs in somebody’s eyes or read star-secrets in a pile of guts.

“Well, I've got the 5.56’s you wanted, and shotgun shells, of course. And the missiles, but I don’t even want to know what you're going to do with those... Let's see...oh! Wanna see my new creation?!”

Moira proudly holds up what appears to be a part of an actual steam engine. The kind that hauled metric tons of coal and gasoline and crude oil, back when the world was whole and there were still people who needed those things.

“The fuck is that?”

“Oh! Well, I call it the ‘Railway Rifle’! It harnesses the power of steam and some pretty neat laws of energy conservation and entropy. I’m a little disappointed I had to use a fission battery as a power source, though. I just couldn’t figure out how to make its motion perpetual, but I suppose the First Law of Thermodynamics is an integral part of the fabric of the universe as we know it, and the Boltzmann Constant is called a _constant_ for a reason-”

“Me surgeon,” Lucky says pointing to herself. “Does the slice-y and the dice-y.”

“Right! Sorry. I just get so excited! Anyhoo, it fires these.”

Lucky’s jaw drops as Moira dumps a box upside down and makes a pile of the biggest nails Lucky’s ever seen.

“Holy fuck. Are these for killing people or deathclaws?”

“Um...both? I haven't actually tested it on anything myself-”

“It tacked a molerat to a concrete wall from forty yards like a game of ‘pin-the-tail-on-the-goddamn-donkey’,” Rome says with a shudder. “It was disgusting. Poor bastard squealed bloody murder til I put another one in its brain.”

“See?!” Moira beams. “Works perfectly!”

“I'll take one and all the spikes you've got.”

Rome looks at her with sharp eyes, the kind that always know more than they’d ever let on.

“You’re gettin’ ready to do somethin’ real stupid, aren’t you.”

“Doing something stupid is pretty much how I live my life.”

“You need backup?” he asks, all nonchalant, but Lucky knows he could fuck shit up if he needed to, and that he probably already had. “I’d be good for it.”

“Charon? You want a fourth?”

Charon looks at Rome with a face of stone, his ‘outside face’, the one that he uses with almost everyone but her.

“No.”

“Well, there you have it. But thanks, Rome. That's really nice of you.”

Those eyes, the ones Moira had fallen in love with, they're hard and hawkish.

“Right. Then all I have to say is, don't let life make you mean.”

“You can let life make you mean, or you can let it kill you. I prefer the former,” Charon says calmly.

Rome snorts a laugh through his nose and ignores him. “Whatever stupid thing you go decide to do, be careful.”

“I can’t promise anything,” Lucky warns.

“Course you can’t. Tell that seven-foot nightmare you run with to be careful, too.”

“I am standing right here,” Charon says, arms crossed and looking only slightly irritated.

“And it'll do you good to hear it twice.”

 

**********

 

And so, with their new and deadly toys, they go to war.

Her, Charon, and Dogmeat.

But it isn't without some struggle.

“What do you think you're doing?”

Lucky's caught him down in the living room in broad daylight, packing his pack when he thought she was asleep.

“I am... packing.”

“I see that. Planning on going somewhere?”

If a two-century-old grown man could look more like a kid caught with their hand in a cookie jar, Lucky would have never have believed it.

“Yes,” he says, straightening upright like he'd been called to attention.

“Without me?”

“Also yes. Please understand, this is dangerous-”

“So am I.”

“That is true-”

“And you're dangerous, and together, we’re a fucking force of nature.”

“That is also true, but if something should happen to you-”

“And if something happens to you, I’ll be alone. Easy pickings. So, no. You are not allowed to go run off and get killed all by yourself. Now, let me pack that. You know I'm better at it than you.”

She sits down on the floor to pack their packs, and Charon grudgingly sits, too, helping her inventory their arsenal.

“Mines?”

“Check.”

“Grenades?”

“Check.”

“Nuka or standard issue?”

“I’m mad at them, so Nukas.”

“An excellent choice. Stimpaks?”

“Check.”

“Count?”

“Um...fifty...three.”

Charon looks at her like she's crazy.

“What? Should I pack more? I have more. A hundred and thirty two at least, and that's just in the ‘Fuck, That Hurts’ locker-

“Fifty is...sufficient.”

“Well, if you're sure. Think I should take the Reservist?”

“Yes. However, let me calibrate its sights.”

“Okay. What about the missile launcher?”

“After sniping the perimeter, this should be a close quarters engagement. Narrow hallways, short lines of sight.”

“And if it's not?”

He thinks.

“I will carry it.”

They both get quiet and keep packing. Dogmeat snores on his rug in the corner while the light rain patters in the metal roof.

“Charon?”

“Yes?”

“Why did you tell Rome no?”

Charon squints as he checks and rechecks the ammunition drum of his shotgun.

“He has already fought his war and come home. I did not think it right to make him leave to fight another.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way. But I'm glad. I wouldn’t want to be the one to tell Moira I got her boyfriend killed.”

Charon checks the buckles and plating of his armor and Lucky blocks the last of her 5.56’s.

“I have never attempted something of this magnitude,” Charon finally admits as he jerks the last buckle, testing the strength of the stitching. “I _have,_ I suppose, but it did not end well.”

“What happened?”

“My employer commanded me to assault a large weapons caravan. Alone. His plan was...ill-advised. I decimated their force, but when I was badly injured, both he and his enemies left me for dead. He himself was killed soon after. I managed to drag myself to a large puddle of irradiated water. That week was...difficult. When I was well enough to move, I found his body and retrieved my contract. It must have looked like trash to them. I wandered for months before I found a new employer.”

“That’s awful. He just left you?”

“Yes. My injuries were...extensive. Perhaps he panicked.”

“A fucking coward more like.”

“You are not wrong.”

“Well, you've got a team, now. That's something, isn’t it?”

His hands are still.

“Yes. It is. I am...unaccustomed to thinking that way. But even so-”

“Don't get all doom and gloom on me, big guy. We did great at Evergreen Mills, didn't we?”

“We did. But those were raiders. These are-”

“Hardened assholes. I know. But I think you underestimate how much you’ve scared them. They already think I'm a ghost, and that you're some kind of eldritch horror. Poor Dogmeat somehow became an actual wolf. And then you send a guy back with his hands for a necklace. That's psychological warfare at its finest.”

He runs his knife across a whetstone in long, smooth movements.

“It was calculated as such, but it would be a lie to say I found no satisfaction in it.”

They’re quiet again, her rearranging the medical kit and him gently taking Stabhappy from her boot to sharpen with the same strokes.

_Shhhh-ick._

_Shhhh-ick._

“Are you afraid I’ll do that to you?”

“Do what?”

“Leave you. Like your other boss did.”

“No. I worry that when the time comes, you will stay.”

_Shhhh-ick._

_Shhhh-ick._

“If something should happen to me-”

“Charon-”

“No,” he says, quiet and looking at the knife’s edge running against the block like it might be the only thing left on earth. “If something should happen to me, you should run. Take the dog. Tell no one. Go north to the Commonwealth, or northwest to the Great Lakes. I have heard of cleaner water there. Perhaps only rumors, but-”

She takes the knife and block out of his hands and sets them down. He looks at her with eyes electric, and while they aren't scared of her, it hurts how much they're scared for her.

“Charon, stop. We both know what this is. This is all or nothing. If we do this, we do it together. Maybe we die. Fine. But at least we die the way we choose. And that's something, too, isn’t it?”

His eyes are wide, blue and fathomless. Like they’re trying to look into her and see it all.

“It is everything.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Literary mentions brought to you by:
> 
> Spring Rain - Sara Teasdale  
> Hope - Emily Dickinson  
> Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll


	19. In the Company of Monsters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I must say thank you. You are all absolutely fantastic. I have struggled so much lately, and you all have helped me break through and keep working, no matter how hard it is. I've been plagued by self-doubt - about where this story is going, how I portray the NPCs, how dark it has become, how far I push my characters. And guys, it's gotten REALLY dark, and I've pushed them VERY far. But we all know exactly what the Wasteland is. It's awful. It's violent. It rewards those who fight and scrap and rips apart the rest. It is its own malevolent entity, but it can be breathtakingly beautiful as well, and I hope I'm capturing all its many facets. 
> 
> So, without further interruption...
> 
>  
> 
> Musical inspiration provided by:
> 
> Threnody - Goldmund  
> It’s Happening Again - Agnes Obel  
> If - Fabrizio Paterlini  
> Despair - Goratie  
> The Blue Hour - Federico Albanese  
> Bless This Morning Year - Helios  
> The Consolations of Philosophy - Max Richter  
> Intervention - Gabriel Parker  
> Delicate Transitions - Gavin Luke  
> Paper Tiger - Helios  
> Wolf Drawn - Emancipator  
> For Steven - Joep Beving  
> The Theory - Clem Leek  
> Augenblick - Dirk Maassen
> 
> And the last scene absolutely must be read with Hozier's 'Arsonist's Lullaby'. Fucking phenomenal, friends.

 

It is a three day trek to their destination, and his Mistress is uncharacteristically quiet. Subdued, if a more accurate word is needed. As if she is thinking hard about something that wants less thinking about. She is tired - that much he can see in the darkening circles under her eyes - and Charon knows exactly why. The nightmares make good rest difficult, and unlike when he had met her, she has decided to combat them by simply avoiding sleep altogether. While tired, she is also determined, and her silent boots travel with purpose. But purpose or no, if she does not stop to rest soon, her performance in battle will be reduced, and that is not an option in an undertaking of this magnitude.

“It is almost dawn,” Charon tells her quietly.

Looking up at the cloud-laced sky, she swings her head to the west and then quickly to the east, studying the stars for something Charon cannot see.

“Huh. Look at that.”

“What?”

“Venus. She’s been doing some funky stuff lately.”

Charon sees nothing out of the ordinary - only the normal stars for which he has no names excepting those she had taught him. And they are strange out here in the open. There are far too many here in the total darkness, a riotous swirl of them that refuse to be numbered or cataloged. He peers at her in the dark, eyes having adjusted to his Mistress’ strange life months ago, and sees a look of confusion he does not fully understand.

“Such as?”

“Well, she's gone, for one thing. I heard the nights get longer and the stars really start to move. I mean, they’ve always been _moving,_ but this is different.”

“And this concerns you?”

“It’s stupid, but it kind of does. Sky’s weird without her.”

She stares in vain at the night, as if willing the wayward planet to come back. Of course, it refuses, and she sighs. “Time to make camp,” she says finally, and Charon knows she dreads the morning for the nightmares it holds. She says nothing about them, only snippets of dead girls on mattresses when waking and soft whimpers of terror while asleep, but Charon can still see them in the corners of her eyes.

They each do their own tasks that have become old habit now. The dog takes what appears to be a simple ramble, but the spiraling route tells him that it is combing the perimeter for threats just as carefully as Charon would. Guard duties taken care of, Charon has time to cook a few rations (one for her, one for the dog, and two for himself) over the small fire he builds. Even in the daylight, there is always a fire when possible. It helps, in some strange, small way, to create ease where there should be none.

His Mistress helps in this regard as well. She had soaked a few heavy canvas tarps in various oils scavenged from a ruined hardware store, let them dry, and had created two waterproof bivy sacks. Charon would never have imagined that sleeping ‘rough’ could be remotely comfortable, but in her typical way, she defies all conventional wisdom and does what she pleases. Shaking out their bedrolls and turning them this way and that, she is careful to place them far enough away from the fire to be safe but close enough to be warm.

And then comes the ritualistic finger-combing of hair, the washing of hands, and the brushing of teeth. Charon had thought these things ridiculous, but like most of her ridiculous habits, they have rubbed off on him. So, with his very own small jar of brown soap and ridiculous blue toothbrush, he participates in the last two activities and finds them to be...nice.

“It’s getting long,” she comments cryptically as he brushes at a tooth far in the back.

“Whaugh?”

“Your hair,” she says. “It’s long.”

Charon spits out the baking soda toothpaste before he chokes on it.

“I had not noticed.”

“Do you want me to cut it for you?” she asks, bold enough reach over and run a remaining lock of hair through her fingers.

It is long. Shaggy, in fact. It got that way because there was never enough to remember it existed at all. But the pieces that did remain grew fast and thick and still that shocking color of red. He apparently takes too long to answer because her fingers leave his hair and drop awkwardly to her side.

“If you wish,” he replies quickly.

Sitting on the log she had dragged over to the fire to act as a bench, she pulls out the smaller of her knives.

Charon had always found people who took solace in religion to be weak. Foolish at best, insane at worst. However, the smile she gives him is benign and benevolent, and in that smile, Charon can understand the attraction. And as the fire snaps sparks in her eyes and she holds the knife lightly in the palm of her hand, he also understands why the gods were both loved and feared.

But it is when she lets her legs fall open and lightly pats her inner thigh - a silent request for him to sit between them - it is then and only then that he understands why some chose to worship goddesses in particular.

So he sits, as if he could possibly do anything else. She could kill him if she wanted. A quick flick of her wrist would have his throat torn open to let his blood pool on the ground.

Charon almost cannot stand it.

While it is a stupid thing to think, Charon does believe she would never hurt him on purpose. Even those legs around him are delightfully distracting. Slim and strong with so many curves of muscle and knobs of bone, they are beautiful, and even worse is their junction that has to be right up against his back. But it is neither of those things that almost make him both want to cringe away and try to lean closer.

It is her fingers.

No one touches his head. Ever. It has been off limits for centuries. It is the weakest point of almost any creature, where the brain and its stem live, and she has her fingers all over it. And if Charon could have any insecurities about his personal appearance, the loss of hair would be second only to the state of his nose. So the way she touches him, soft and gentle and unafraid, Charon is fairly certain he will either melt or explode.

And when she asks how short he wants his hair, his brain really does explode, but with memory.

 

_“Do you want it shorter this time?” she asks, lips on his ear as her fingertips play along the side of his neck. He murmurs a ‘no’, and her laugh is soft smoke from a fresh cigarette._

_“You just want me to cut it more often, don't you,” she accuses, and as she runs her fingers through what length of auburn hair the Berets will allow, he decides there is some truth to that._

 

Charon has apparently contracted some kind of rigor mortis, because his Mistress laughs.

“Jeez, big guy,” she teases, gently pounding the tops of his shoulders with her tiny fists, “you gotta relax a little.”

He simply growls at her because that is impossible. But, when she presses her fingers into the substantial meat of his shoulders and squeezes, the impossible becomes reality and he really does melt.

“You’re a mess,” she tells him cheerfully, grinding her thumbs into a spot that makes his whole frame go limp and forces out a small sound somewhere between a groan and a squeak.

She does not even seem to notice his ruined skin or half-head of hair, and he cannot understand it. Touching his wrist when she talks to him as if he is any other normal person, even looking him square in his opaque eyes and smiling while she does it - Charon comes to the shocking realization that if his Mistress had ever been afraid of him, she certainly is not anymore. In fact, Charon thinks that she really does view him as a friend _._ A person in which she has somehow found at least one redeeming quality besides the preternatural ability to destroy any creature that has displeased her. Someone whose opinion she actually values, one who she chooses to spend time with for no other reason than because she simply wants to.

Charon also thinks he has never seen or heard of anything so ludicrous in his entire life, yet there it is.

But then she splays her fingers on each side of his throat and pushes her thumbs into the scruff of his neck and Charon loses the ability to think about anything at all. It seems to go on for hours, whatever this is, even though it can only be a few minutes. But too soon, she gives one last squeeze and lets him go.

“Better?”

‘Better’ is not accurate. Charon rolls his shoulders and tilts his neck, and they produce cracks and pops that he has not been able to make in years.

“Yes.”

“Good,” she says happily, getting to work on his hair.

There is not much, so it only takes her a handful of minutes, but Charon holds on to each one as long as he can.

“All done,” she chirps too soon, fussily brushing away any stray hairs off the back of his neck. Scrubbing a hand over his scalp, he finds she has cut it much shorter than he would have himself.

Charon considers it a vast improvement.

“You should sleep now,” he tells her, and she only argues for a moment before sliding into her sleeping sack.

“I don't want to,” she says, voice very small as she looks up at him, and Charon is suddenly very thankful that out of all the disasters that make up the bulk of his life, nightmares do not count among them.

So he finds himself doing silly things to get her to sleep. It is the dog’s watch now, and the mutt is good at this shift. It is the strange time when humans still sleep and only the animals begin to wake. It scents at the air, quiet, but alert as the most dedicated sentry. Padding on silent paws, it makes regular patrols of the perimeter, and Charon decides his Mistress would be dead at least a few times if not for the mutt.

But for being as safe as any Wasteland  creature could be, she still fights sleep like an enemy. He searches her pack for a book to read to her, like she always does for him when she thinks he needs it. Charon is only a little surprised when she scoots her bed over to lay her head on his thigh to listen.

He finds a little book, less than one hundred pages. And though it may be slim and small, its bright green cover and gilt-edged pages never fail to catch his eye. It looks even tinier in his big hands, but his fingers remember how to turn the onion-skin paper without destroying it. Dickinson is a safe choice, he thinks. And like the book they live in, her words are quiet, yet just loud enough to be remembered.

But these words are too wholesome to be read in the crow-rasp that he makes, too innocent to sound like a bucket full of rusty nails. He stops midway, and she tilts her head to look up at him.

“What's wrong?”

“It sounds better when you read it.”

“I like your voice,” she says, and as if she had presented a point with no possible rebuttal, she burrows into her bedroll and sighs contentedly.

 

_Will there really be a morning?_

_Is there such a thing as day?_

_Could I see it from the mountains_

_If I were as tall as they?_

_Has it feet like waterlilies?_

_Has it feathers like a bird?_

_Is it brought from famous countries_

_Of which I have never heard?_

_Oh some scholar! Oh some sailor!_

_Oh some wise man from the skies!_

_Please to tell a little pilgrim_

_Where the place called morning lies._

 

She closes her eyes against the coming day and sleeps, breaths clean and even, and Charon is left alone in the quiet. He winds his fingers in her hair and thinks about many things in the six or seven hours that he lets her sleep.

Chiefly, Charon thinks there may be something wrong with him. It is hard to say exactly what, or when it had even started, but it is there nonetheless.

He keeps staring at his Mistress.

No _staring_ exactly, but he cannot seem to keep his eyes from sliding over her every chance they get. And lately, they have been getting plenty of chances.

Some things are mundane. Perhaps even innocent. The look of wonder on her face when she sees her first rainbow as the sun shines through a spent rainstorm. The dexterity of her fingers when she uses them to bully her wild curls into their mohawked braid. The way she laughs out loud when she reads an amusing passage in one of her books because for her, it has become real.

Some things, though? Some things are decidedly more carnal in nature.

Watching her all her curves and lines bend in fascinating ways when she hurdles over a fence, or better yet, when she dips under it. The way her throat works when she greedily downs a bottle of water after a difficult fight. The swell of her calves when she reaches up on tiptoes to reach a high shelf. Her chest heaving after a run. The way she moves when they spar, quick and lithe as her curves and lines turn to weapons. When he wakes her for her watch and she looks up at him with such trust and quiet contentment, he could almost mistake it for sleepy want.

And that only makes his brain invent different scenarios where he could wake her, mostly involving his mouth and tongue on certain soft places-

Charon shuts those thoughts down before his pants get too tight but with her head in his lap, finds it an uphill battle.

Forcing his thoughts in the opposite direction, Charon wonders how long this can possibly last. She will tire of him eventually. This much is guaranteed. She is young and he is...not. And when she finally cuts his contract out of herself to sell to another...well, Charon is not sure how he could possibly go back to his old life. Oh, he would. He would be forced to, and there would not be a damn thing to be done about it. Those small bits of what he has come to understand are something like happiness, he will have to file those away like everything else. He has stupidly allowed her to get closer than anyone else in his available memory, and it is a mistake. One that will probably cost him his life in the end.

This thing that his Mistress has chosen to do - to throw in with everything she has instead of hiding - it is a substantial risk, but he also understands the necessity. He can certainly think of no other he would rather attempt it with. She has become, for lack of a better word, _dangerous._ They spar together almost every other day, and with her fierce little grin and insatiable desire to learn, she has almost become a challenge. Charon has taught her as much as he can think of to keep her alive, but it is that inherent streak of pure viciousness that serves her better than all the lessons he could ever give. In a different person, it would have been a sickly poison that devours from within. But in her, it glows bright, the burning ember that starts a wildfire, the kind that cleanses with destruction because that is the only way it knows.

So then, this decision that she makes. In another, it would be stupidity. But her? In her, Charon finds it...admirable. But however admirable, it is also something akin to suicide, and he knows statistically, their chances of failure are high. And in this endeavor, to fail is to die.

But is that not something Charon would have chosen for himself, had it been possible? Had he not wished for the end so many times before? In the quiet dark of those 0400 hours, those small minutes that are so different from all the others, had he not wished that he could wind down just as silently? But those strange minutes between dark and light have changed. Before, they were thin and shivering, long and brittle in the night.

Now they are full to bursting and pass much too quickly.

They are the minutes when her eyes get heavy with coming sleep, and she tries to blink the inevitable away so she can stay up just a little longer. Minutes of her reading, telling unlikely stories of talking flowers,  opium-addled caterpillars, and white rabbits who have misplaced their gloves. Minutes of her floating while counting every star, of watching the rain with his hands in hers as if she cannot see the blood on them.

A whimper in her sleep now, a twitch as the nightmares try to take hold, but his fingers twisting into her hair to trace light circles on her scalp change the whimper to a soft sigh, and she wriggles closer to his body heat, putting a hand on the thigh she has claimed as a pillow. And for the first time in what he can remember in his long life, Charon decides he is becoming greedy, because he wants more of these 0400 minutes.

He wants them all.

**********

It is, as his Mistress says, a ‘fucking slog’.

And she is not wrong. Charon has never met opposition like this in recent memory. There are simply so many. It seems to take days, and that is only the outside.

However, together they are a formidable force. The dog, who Charon was not certain could be a proper member of a strike ‘team’, proves incredibly useful. While Charon had seen it tear apart an opponent with relative ease, its intelligence is the reason for its success. The mutt moves silent, without a bark or growl, ambushing and flanking with a sense of urgency that is almost human. And his Mistress has even fashioned what Charon would call a canine cuirass out of leftover leather armor and he does have to admire it. Flexible, light, and low profile, it almost looks like black scales, complete with a handle so Charon can haul the mutt up to out of the way places with ease. The dog seems to think it great fun, because even when carried like a glorified suitcase, it still wags its tail at him and slobbers on anything within reach.

Well equipped as they may be, there are still combatants are everywhere, and they are well trained to a man. Mercenaries, guard dogs, Mr. Gutsy's, turrets - those are expected. However, the passing yao guai that heard the unholy racket and came to search for an easy meal is not. To its detriment, it only finds Charon. The battle is almost even, claws in exchange for buckshot.

“That,” he pants, “was _not_ supposed to be here.”

“Amen, big guy. Amen.”

His Mistress’s eyes are tired around the edges, but damn if she is not having _fun._

They both snipe the perimeter as long as possible, softening the field, and when maximum confusion has been sown, all three rush in. A well-oiled machine could not work more efficiently and it feels, for lack of a better word, _good._  Such a strange feeling, being protected and watched over - one Charon thinks he could get used to but knows he should not allow himself the luxury.

But when his Mistress screams at him to get down and he drops like a stone before the chip in his brain even has a chance to make him twitch, it is in that moment of perfect clarity he realizes that he does trust her with his life. A missile goes scudding past his head and into the tent behind him, one he thought he had already cleared. It explodes and the blast is like a solar flare, all heat and light.

Ears ringing, he finds his sleeve is on fire. He irritably bats out the flame and then little half-gloved hands are quickly checking him for burns.

“Are you okay?!” she demands more than asks, eyes narrowed with concern.

“Singed, but well. Was there a particular reason you set off a bomb on my six?”

She looks at him, sheepish and still worried. “Blips behind you,” she says, shaking her little wrist computer as if that alone should answer his question. “It was that or let five fuck-knuckles shoot you in the back.”

“A good decision, if aggressive,” he quips as he gets back to work, checking lines of sight into the officer’s tent in case someone survived the blast.

They most certainly did not.

His Mistress, following him close enough to touch, stumbles. She grabs his arm and yelps as if she had been bitten.

“Holy shit!”

“Are you well?”

She makes a sick-dog gag and shakes her leg to dislodge a body part of unknown attachment that she had ungracefully tripped over.

“Arm? Leg maybe?” she wonders to herself, looking at it closely and nudging it with the toe of her boot.

“I am sorry, Mistress. I was sure I cleared this area.”

Limb of dubious origin forgotten, she has gone silent, her head tilted and staring at nothing, as if listening for music that he cannot hear.

“You did,” she whispers, crouching and becoming small. Even unsure of what she is now hiding from, he follows her lead, doing his best to become small as well. Pointing to a manhole hidden under a table that he had completely missed, she grins at him with her dusty face lit up from the inside. “They came from down there. Like little molerats.”

“And how would you exterminate this den of molerats?”

“Poison,” she whispers back immediately.

“It will be difficult to convince them to eat it,” he replies sardonically.

A finger on her lips, a request for silence. “Listen, though. Can't you hear it?”

He slows his breathing and listens, but hears nothing. A shake of his head tells her as much.

“Mercs. They're arguing. I think they can’t decide whether to send more out.”

The mood is tense and heavy, because he knows - they both know - that this is the last chance to retreat. But she just grins and proceeds to pull the most ridiculous item out of her pack that Charon has ever seen or heard of.

It is a gas mask.

That in itself is not so strange. She always carries one, ‘just in case’. But this is for the dog. Why he had not expected it, he is not sure. Of course he should have, but it still makes him snort.

“Such a good Snarfle-Barf!” she croons, slipping the modified gasmask over its muzzle and fastening it behind its ears. “Who’s mama’s best Snorkie-Porkie-Pie?”

Tail thumping wildly, it gives a muffled woof, apparently to say that it alone has that dubious distinction and seems more than happy to wear the contraption if it would please its ‘mama’.

“You packed your gasmask?” she asks, sliding her own over her face.

“Yes,” he says, donning it as quickly as he can. It is obvious she has a plan, and Charon has learned enough about her to be sure he does not want to be on the wrong end of that plan.

“Awesome!” she says, giving him an enthusiastic thumbs-up, and even through the filter of the gasmask, Charon can hear the vicious in her voice. Setting to work on what he can only wonder at, his Mistress carefully empties a small jug of greenish-yellow liquid into a large plastic bottle and crushes tablets of unknown chemical makeup into a fine powder. Ingredients in hand, she approaches the manhole cautiously, testing its weight. After a few tugs, she seems satisfied that she can lift it unassisted.

“Stay back,” she warns. “This is dangerous.”

Charon takes exactly one step back, because if she is going to do something dangerous, the last thing he will let her do is do it alone.

Gingerly, as if she is afraid of it, she quickly mixes what Charon decides are explosive reagents, loosely caps the bottle and drops it down the manhole like a grenade, carefully closing the lid back down and backpedaling to the tent door. Taut as a pulled garrote wire, she keeps her rifle trained at the manhole and waits.

But there is nothing. No explosions, no smoke, nothing, and Charon shakes his head in consternation at her failure.

“Your ordnance is a dud,” he tells her. A standard issue grenade would have been better. Louder, perhaps, but certainly more efficient.

“Just wait. Be ready though.”

So he waits, becoming more impatient. They will alert more of their comrades, and the less they know, the better. But soon, things begin to stir below the surface. Banging sounds, coughs and loud hacking, wet wheezing.

“Molerats always head for the surface,” she says sagely, rifle still at the ready, and Charon follows her example.

But no one comes out of the hole in the ground. There is only silence. She cocks her head in what Charon thinks may be confusion.

“Huh. That's weird. They should have come up by now.” She waits, scuffing the toe of her boot into the ground, but the silence remains.

Finally she shrugs, unable to take the quiet. Charon understands that, because he does not like it at all. “Oh well. We’ll just have to take care of them down there. Be careful,” she warns. “It should have softened ‘em up, but I dunno how soft they'll be. I never made it before.”

Charon stares at her as if she is mad, because he is fairly certain she is.

“What do you mean you ‘never made it before’?”

She must be able to sense the incredulity from behind his mask because the toe of her boot goes from making a divot to a proper hole. “Well, I mean, I read _how_ , I just never actually did it. Yet. You know.”

Charon does not know. He will never know. Not in a million years would he have even thought to do something so stupid.

“You have no practice constructing this bomb, and thought that the middle of battle is the best time to test it?”

“Um...yes?”

“That is the wrong answer-”

“Well, think of it like a field trial!”

“A trial comes after an experiment. Not before-”

“Speaking of which,” she says loudly to drown out his protests, “let's go see how we did!” she chirps, ripping open the manhole and jumping down like there was not a nest of trained killers waiting for her.

“Keep your mask on!” she yells from below, and even cleverly covered, there is fear in her voice. Charon does, but grabs the dog by its harness and scrambles down after her.

“But I don't...shouldn't've...it didn't say anything,” she babbles, looking around wildly. Charon finds himself disembodied in a sickly yellow cloud and his heart rate skyrockets as a memory rips through his brain.

 

_Northern Turkmenistan. A filthy refugee camp, born of civil war and ethnic cleansing, stuffed with old women and children. Canvas bags of rice slip out of his big hands into frantic grasping ones. His rifle and height demand order, but desperation breeds violence, even among grandmothers and fourth graders. First, soft murmurs, then pandemonium. Azeri gibberish and a scream of ‘gas’ in Russian, his mask barely on before a child throws themselves at him, all huge, terrified eyes set in an emaciated face. He wraps his shemagh around their foaming mouth, but knows it is too little too late. The girl, no more than five, gags, gurgles, convulses, and dies. Only his squad still stands, masked monoliths lording over a field of death. He wonders who will eat the rice._

 

Something grabs tightly to the ankle of his boot and tugs. Charon reflexively kicks out and the toe of his boot connects with something fleshy.

It is a man, a live one, more or less. His face is a grotesque pinkish blue, that ubiquitous foam spilling out of a mouth that tries to scream. But as the cloud begins to dissipate, Charon sees the rest. Not just one man, but six. No outward signs of trauma, just bodies that have contorted and twisted, lungs drowned by fluid of their own making. The alcove had been small and close with twisting, low-ceilinged passageways that offered little to no ventilation. The gas had blinded them and not understanding, they had bunched together, milling about like panicked cattle as they breathed in enough poison to suffocate.

So many thoughts and emotions - some old, some new - all war with each other, fighting tooth and nail with none the victor. Terror vies with elation, the gripping fear as he rechecks the seal of his gasmask is contested by the racing endorphins that dead enemies on the ground always brings. The disjointed thoughts from old memories are horrors for which he cannot assign a name - they battle with a fierce satisfaction that he still lives while others do not. The juxtaposition is a visceral twisting in his gut that he knows he will probably never understand the true depth of.

What she has done, what she had created, it is wrong. Some unspoken rule of war has been broken and Charon can feel it like the tremors after a night terror. It is unfair at best, a crime against humanity at worst.

But the Geneva Convention is null and void in this hellscape, and there is a cold and hard truth in survival that demands much from everyone. And why is this different than any other method of murder? How is this different from the landmines they set or the grenades they throw or the missiles they let fly? How far should one go to destroy their enemies? That world is not fair, so why should they have to be?

His world had been black and white, right and wrong, the righteous and the damned.

But now? Now the world is awash in gray, and for Charon, gray is not a comfortable color.

“Well, shit. It worked, I guess. But better,” she says slowly, and so much of her voice is lost behind the mask, so much nuance is suppressed, Charon cannot guess what she is feeling.

“Better?” Charon asks stupidly.

“I mean, look,” she says, sweeping an arm dramatically across the slowly dissipating cloud.

“I see it,” he snaps, an edge to his voice that must make it to the other side of his mask because she nervously shifts from one foot to the other.

“It was in the Big Book of Science!” she protests.

“Please explain.”

She does, with a flood of words and thoughts so jumbled Charon can scarcely follow.

“Okay, so ammonia. From a janitor’s closet. That's easy. Weak base at best. It smelled _really_ bad, but no big deal. And chlorine tablets from that old swimming pool store. But, I mean, it couldn't have been _pure_ chlorine. Had to have some N’s and O’s hooked on the Cl’s somewhere. Pure chlorine would be way too unstable. And the ammonia, it had dilution instructions on the bottle, but they wouldn't have sold something so dangerous to just anybody. Right? That’d be crazy. But it wasn’t...it was supposed to be a tear gas. Just irritating. Not all...this.”

The dying mercenary tries to climb up his leg, gasping and spasming, watering eyes round and huge with fear. Charon takes their head in his hands and gives a violent twist, neatly separating the vertebrae with a muffled crunch. He lays them back on the ground gently, and he is not sure why.

“I would ask something of you,” he says calmly, and on her answer, much depends.

“Okay.”

“Never do this again.”

Behind her mask, he can see her eyes, liquid grey, soft but steely.

“They're dead and we’re not, and I won't apologize for that,” she says stoutly.

“That is not what I asked of you.”

“Then I promise. Never again.”

She looks at him, eyes searching his own through their visors.

“You remember something, don't you. Something bad.”

“Yes,” he says, and he will tell her this and in sordid detail, because he needs her to understand. “Extermination of people, but with sarin gas, not chlorine. Colorless, tasteless, no scent. First, watering eyes, shortness of breath. In less than a three minutes, convulsions, seizures. Then, asphyxiation. It does not discriminate between guilty or innocent. But they were children instead of men. It was...horrific.”

She says nothing, simply taking in the carnage she has created as if committing every detail to memory.

 _“Beware that when fighting monsters, you do not become a monster yourself,”_ she murmurs quietly to herself.

 _“For when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you,”_ Charon finishes for her. ‘God is dead’ she had told him with such flint in her voice, eyes made hard out of both necessity and pain. Those words had been burned into his mind, and he had devoured the unassuming beige book of one Mr. Friedrich Nietzsche, had picked apart each phrase and examined them from every angle, wanting to understand it and therefore, her. He knows she had taken some words out of context, had twisted them around her fingers until they fit her view of the world.

“Thank you,” she finally says.

“For what?”

She does not immediately elaborate, and Charon does not press. From behind the plastic faceplate, Charon can see the gears and cogs churning out their strange thoughts.

“For reminding me. I asked you once, if you would tell me if I was doing something bad.”

“So you did.”

She has turned in on herself, growing smaller and somehow weaker.

“Should we just go back home?”

 _Home._ It is a home. A home with her. He looks at her anxious eyes and sees no lie in them, only stifling uncertainty, and he wonders if he has made a mistake, if he has thrown cold water on her cleansing flame. A fire like that is necessary to survive, and he is afraid he has said something to snuff it out.

“That is not possible and you know it.”

“Yeah. I know,” she sighs, and checking her rifle, she trudges through the thin yellow fog.

 

**********

 

If Talon Company’s front yard was fun for his Mistress, their living room is not.

After the tactical decision to go down the manhole as a side entrance rather than kick down the front door, they discover they have unwittingly made the decision to kill each and every soul the whole complex contains to get to Jabsco. But in retrospect, it is _very_ satisfying to beat the snake’s body to death while looking for its neck.

And there are plenty of targets on which to spend any pent up aggression, because the complex is infested with them - around every corner, in every alcove, on every stairwell of every level. But still they press on. Charon throws grenades into crowded rooms and she makes headshots with with breathtaking precision. She hacks terminals to rewire turret targeting parameters, he blows apart whatever still stumbles around. The mutt stays close, silently ripping up throats when he finds a loner with a knife or bat.

And the sheer number of ammunition and weaponry they find is staggering.

“You know, we could set up a base here,” she whispers as they take a moment to rest before going through a door ominously marked “Commander’s Quarters’. “Or maybe the Regulators might like it.”

“How do you know about-”

“Oh. Forgot to tell you. Once, when I was wandering, some guy left me a note. Said to go to these coordinates, so I did-”

“It could have been a trap,” he says sagely, wrapping a bandage around the glancing bullet wound above the back of his knee.

“Of course it could! Now who's telling this story?! Anyway- hey, stop that, you’re doing it wrong -” she says, nudging his hands away and fussily rewrapping the bandage in a figure-eight, “ so it’s a cabin full of these crazy people, all dressed up like cowboys. Called themselves ‘The Regulators”. Told me they'd give me caps for every asshole I killed. But here's the thing that skeeved me out. They wanted their _fingers_.”

“Yes. As proof.”

“Wow. That doesn’t bother you at all.”

“Of course it bothers me. Their system is inherently flawed. They have no way of knowing whose finger-”

“And _that's_ what bothers you. Not carrying around a filthy bag of smelly, rotty human fingers-”

“It is a bad business model.”

“Eh. You're right. Fingers don't really bother me anymore. Once, I shot a guy in the face and a bit of his brain landed in a glass of whiskey. Just floated there like a fish gone belly-up. I think that was the last time I really puked.”

“That is...impressive.”

“I know, right? So, this is the last push. I can feel it. You ready?”

Charon pulls something out of his pack, something he has been saving for exactly a moment like this, something small and square, but surprisingly heavy.

“Take this.”

“Charon-”

“Please take it. If something should happen, use it. As we talked about.”

She takes the Stealth-Boy in her hands and looks at him with yet another something in her eyes he does not understand, something quick and fleeting that he just cannot seem to grasp.

“Okay.”

Charon wonders if she has ever lied to him before or if this is just the first time.

 

**********

 

Of all the words Charon has in his rather bloated vocabulary, _bad_ seems just as descriptive as any other in this situation.

Bad corners, bad lines of sight, bad pipes that hang down from ceilings at bad angles, everything is just _bad._

His Mistress gleefully hacks a terminal and does something both delicate and devastating to its internal programming, but there must be some kind of glitch.

“Goddamnit!” she says, punching her fist where a computer’s face might be if it had one.

“What?”

She huffs discontentedly, shaking out her hand and rubbing at the knuckles. “That was supposed to be our ticket. Turn the turret on them.”

“Analog methods are always more reliable than digital,” he says, a combat note blazing through his grey matter to the front like a light of truth. As it should. It had been tattooed onto the back of his skull with blood and pain, after all.

“Right. Well, let's do this the old fashioned way. Guns blazing.”

“Agreed.”

They both whip around the corner, his Mistress’s rifle winging a guard, Charon’s grenade blowing the legs off another. Even in the din, he hears something that does not belong, a high-pitched whine, and out of the corner of his eye, movement. Without hesitation, without even understanding why, his hind brain takes over, galvanizing bone, muscle, and nerves into action, sending him sailing through the air to his left and in front of his Mistress. What follows, Charon simply cannot account for.

The entire world disappears.

It is like nothing he has ever experienced. At first, light. Heat. Sounds like thunder. And then nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

And never, in all two hundred years of life that he can remember, has he felt anything like it. Somewhere in the deep recesses of the primal part of his brain, things keep stirring, demanding movement, but Charon is fairly certain he is dead.

No light, no dark, no sound, no silence. Just an emptiness left like the echoes of memories. But in a burst, the echoes cry out loud enough to shake the earth.

 

_A parade. A girl. Confetti in her blonde hair. She smiles and waves at someone across the street. Surely she is too beautiful to be alone._

_Dinner. Smoke alarms cry foul at burned sauce. She laughs at him behind her hands. Dining out instead. He forgets to eat. She is soft when she speaks._

_His boat. The bay. Beyond, open ocean. Beyond that, the world. This ship could take them there. Twenty-six feet, well-stocked and capable. But the rest of the world waits patiently for war. So here, surf, sun, and quiet swells. Wind playing havoc with her hair, she smiles at him and all is lost._

_He drives. They go nowhere. A spark in her eyes, warm wickedness curled up in her tongue. Hand on his thigh, she wastes no time._

_She sinks down onto him with a small sigh. Her face in his hands, a nebula between her legs. Her eyes are open, blue and bottomless. Only an indifferent god could create such a creature and misplace it. He thinks he has stolen someone else's blessing, but does not complain._

_He asks if she’s sure. She nods, small and scared because she thinks she's alone. He smiles, quiet and awed, because he could never be more than he is right now. He takes her hand in his._

_She said yes. She said yes. She said yes._

_A universe in her belly, small yet vast. She murmurs quiet incantations to it at night to help it grow. He watches and listens. They wait._

_Orders. Unexpected and unasked for. There is no destination. There never is, not when the world burns. She cries and does not stop._

_A call. The last. The things she tells him twist into his chest, sharp and sweet. Things like, ‘I love you’, ‘doctor says it’s going to be a girl’, and ‘come home safe, we’re waiting for you’. They wait for a ghost, but he does not have the strength to say it out loud._

_In those first days, he is filled with Rachael. Rachael behind his eyes. Rachael on his tongue. Rachael between his fingers. Rachael under his skin. Rachael in his veins. He keeps her hidden deep, but they still find her._

_He knows the letter she will receive. ‘We regret to inform you…’ It would be better if it were true. By the time he counts backwards from ten, it is. He is empty of her now, except the two syllables of her name. They beat that out of him next._

 

A hot rush of smoke-laced air to the lungs and he is choking. Quick flash of understanding, so bright, and Charon decides he must be in hell. But as quick as it came, his mind goes dim and distant. Something delicate in his hands. He squeezes. It makes small sounds. A face. Strange yet not. A woman, straddling him. Dark. Not blonde. Afraid.

“Where is Rachael?”

His voice is wrong, canned-air tinny and too far away. Everything is wrong.

“Who’s Rachael?” the woman asks, wheezing.

He is strangling her. He does not know why, but knows somehow that is wrong too. Very wrong. He lets her go, and her eyes, they are fixed on his face, rough seas and high tides.

“It’s okay, big guy.”

This voice, so unlike his own, speaks of 0400 minutes and packages of apples. Corkscrew curls in his fingers and books stacked high.

His pulse races, red in his eyes, sea-roar in his ears. He stumbles upright, knocking her to the floor. She takes one look and scurries away. Poison in his veins, the killing kind. Ecstatic, electric, waves of certain somethings rolling through at breakneck speeds. He shudders with the power of it as it pulls at a corner of his mind, tugs and tears until it finds what it wants and takes it.

Movement now, screams of pain and panic. Tang of blood and acrid smoke. He moves smooth, limbs light and joyous. A steel rod finds its way into his hand. It is good, heavy and thick, making wet sounds against flesh and bone. Blood sprays in sparkling drops, ruby-red and fresh. Some are stuck to walls with spikes and it is too much to understand. Others limp and bleed, and those are better, running, but not nearly fast enough. Others fight, and those are best. Pain of his own sometimes, pains in legs and arms and face, but cotton-dull and damp.

But soon, silence. Too much silence, too much stillness, all too heavy. It presses down until he can barely breathe. The need to move, to hunt, it simmers and boils as he paces-

“Hey.”

She is not real, too beautiful to be real. Cannot be real, but is stubborn enough to still be here anyway.

“Why are you here?” he asks raspily, so confused. “You should not be here.”

“Why not?” she asks defiantly, arms crossed under breasts in a way that pushes them up, makes him wonder how their weight might feel in his hands, how soft the skin might be, and then other, different chemicals race through his blood, quick and demanding, mingling with leftover rage and pain and he has lost the words, forgotten what he wants to say-

 _“Why not?”_ she repeats, arms crossing tighter, and standing before him, she is small, but made of a light that makes her seem larger somehow.

“Because hell has no angels.”

“Oh, jeez. Okay. Take this though. It'll keep you safe.”

She holds a knife her hand, but the knife is not what catches his attention. It is the skin. He admires how the brown skin stretches over the fine bones, the square knuckles, how the fingers flex and bend, those strange chemicals whispering in his mind wonder how they might look wrapped around him, stroking, petting, pleasing-

“It’s yours,” she says softly, and his gaze flicks up to her own, and it is worried. Attention back to the knife held out handle first. Handle first means friend, means trust given freely. Gears switch, thoughts on threads uncatchable. This knife, it is better in some ways than this steel rod, worse in others. The rod has the beautiful blood on it, but the knife is familiar and comforting in his off-hand. He keeps them both.

Ears picking up new sounds now, panicking rats scritching below. Things full of jewel-tone blood speak in frightened whispers. It make his fingertips prickle and his own blood them close to the skin.

“Be careful,” the 0400 voice behind him says softly.

Down some stairs, around a hallway, through another, then another, a maze of dreams in dreams with no end.

They are hiding, but Charon finds them. One with a gun, so Charon flips the knife in between his fingers, and the rush of pleasure when it thumps wetly into a throat is almost overwhelming. He retrieves the knife and smiles at the scrape of the serrated edge catching on cartilage. He finds more, lets their blood and admires the way it pools, delights in the way it sticks to the soles of his boots and the cools the backs of his scraped knuckles. The battle-chemicals have sublimated into something strange, something _else._ One is left, an important one. It hides best, behind a steel door. That opens easily enough, but behind it is a thick wall of junk.

Growls deep in his throat as he pulls apart a chair, louder as he rips through a filing cabinet. Tearing at a fan, the blade slicing through his palm. Blood on his hands, his own now, skin torn, sharp pain that comes too close. A voice begging behind it, offering useless things in exchange for keeping its blood. A hole in the wall now, just enough to get his arms through, but there simply is not enough room-

“I’ll give you caps! As many as you can carry!”

Charon responds by throwing himself at an upended steel desk over and over, but it only scrapes mere inches. Frustrated, he grabs a lamp to throw at it-

“Charon.”

That voice again.

“Charon, stand down.”

He turns on his heel to face her, lamp falling from his hand with a crash as the bulb shatters on steel decking.

“I need you to guard the stairs. Can you do that?”

Not a command. The wrong tone, too unsure, too hesitant. Fidgeting now, fists clenching and releasing, weaving back and forth from one boot to the other, a man’s snot-filled bawling mixed with the shape of the woman in front of him, curves and cries, her chest rising and falling, freckles dusted thick and tongue-traceable, heat twisting low in his belly, blood thrumming under skin - his, hers, his enemy - the blood calling and calling, so loud, so _exciting-_

Fingers snap in front of his face. “Focus!” the voice barks, and the wave is easier to ride now. He is starting to understand its ebbs and flows, learning to avoid its undertows and riptides.

“Your mission is to guard those stairs. Do not let anyone in or out. Do you understand?”

He pauses, so confused, his mind being torn in two. “Yes...no. My purpose...to protect my employer - to protect you - at all costs... No. No, to obey-”

“Are you doubting your orders?!” The voice has become desolate and completely unforgiving. It sounds better now, sharp and more demanding.

“No, ma’am,” he says quickly, and is so thankful that the thrumming blood is beginning to still and the gnawing heat is finally dissipating.

“Then load up.”

She gives him a gun, big and nasty. The moment his fingers touch it, he knows it has always been his. Checking it over and loading three more shells, he is distantly satisfied and turns about-face to carry out his new directives.

“Everything's gonna be okay,” she tells him as he walks away, and the voice is softer, kinder, and it sends a thrill down his spine that he has pleased rather than disappointed.

He reaches the top of the stairs, and a crashing wave of consciousness smacks him hard like a slap in the face. Arousal in battle has never happened before. That is...unheard of. But the slowly easing tightness in certain regions of his underarmor tells him that is exactly what has happened. Tiredness, too. An exhaustion like he cannot remember feeling before weighs heavy. But he does remember it, if he reaches back far enough into the unfrequented files of his mind.

 

_Long needle. Injector ugly in his hand. Three quick breaths, the last long and slow. Planning and preparation, setting the groundwork for a controlled detonation. Center found, eye of storm. Twinge at the neck, silence, then a quiet roar in the ears. Alert, focused. The familiar nothing as time stops, then rushes back against his face. Blood on the ground, more in his mouth as he pants for air. Bodies lie twitching at his feet, dead yet still straining._

_“Excellent,” Commander says, pleased and content, and the praise rolls smooth through his veins like just another drug._

 

Fatigue brought by overextending what both human or ghoul should be capable of, it tears at his gut, and he retches. His eyes water and teeth chatter, and he wipes the back of a shaking hand across his mouth. He is within himself now, more grounded, more present, and it all begins to properly _hurt_. Stinging cuts, bruises, and burns on his arms and face, but it is the deep throbbing ache running in fierce waves down his chest and ribs that clear his vision completely.

Looking down, he sees that his chestplate, the one his Mistress should have claimed for herself but had instead so carefully and thoughtfully tailored for him, has been cut halfway off, hanging on by one strap and cracked down the middle like two quarreling tectonic plates. Bits of shrapnel have embedded themselves along the edges and he does not dare stick his fingers in for fear they will be sliced to ribbons. Blackened by flame that had only recently been extinguished, it reeks of burned chemicals and flash-cooked plastic and Charon wants it _off._ He tears at the remaining buckle only to find that it has been melted closed, so he pulls it over his head like a soiled shirt, wincing when it catches at a burn on his neck.

Voices from below capture his attention. His Mistress, surprisingly genial, the other quick and terrified. Charon can only catch a few words from their fairly lengthy conversation, some that make sense - ‘please’, ‘no’, and ‘don’t’ - but others that do not - ‘water’, ‘friend’, and ‘kidneys’.

Charon can hear an indistinct yell, panic at the edges, but her own voice stays low and pleasant.

“Quit waving that around. You’ll shoot your eye out.”

A strangled scream of rage that she laughs at. “Just think about what I said, okay?” she says sweetly, as if giving good advice to a wayward teenager.

Scrape of a steel door closing and a heavy thud of metal that says it has been barred shut. Voices quiet, now. Only the muffled snivelling of a grown man behind a steel door and an impenetrable stack of junk. Soon though, steps - both human and animal - quietly come up the stairs. Shotgun ready, relief washes over when she appears with the mutt by her side.

“Are you injured?” he asks quickly, and is pleased when she shakes her head in the negative. She skirts around him, careful to keep plenty of distance between them as she closes the cellar-style doors and bars then from the inside, ensuring no one will be able to sneak in unnoticed. She descends to a landing and paces, and he wonders if she is angry with him.

“I’m so sorry,” she finally says, voice hoarse like she had been screaming for hours. Charon is not sure what she is sorry for, but the guilt that weighs down her words says that she has committed a crime so heinous hell itself may not accept her.

“What have you done?” he asks quietly, and is almost certain he would rather not know.

She shrinks away from him as if he had struck her.

“I…” and then so many words so fast Charon can barely make heads or tails of it, and her pacing and flapping certainly does not improve the ease of translation.

“You were _hurt!_ Jumped in front of me like a jackass, caught a rocket to the chest! You died, you know! Just laying there, gulping like a fish, agonal breaths at best, fuck-all dead at worst, never been so scared in all my life-”

“Dead?! I do not underst-”

 _“Your heart stopped, stupid!”_ she howls with a frustrated stomp of her tiny boot. “No pulse, so I tried CPR, even stimpaks, but those don’t kick a heart in the ass, and I had to get it started back up again before your brain quit perfusing and you ended up a vegetable, and it’s not like anybody thought to stock epinephrine in this hellhole-”

Defensive now, fear and guilt turned to anger, as if it was Charon’s fault the standard of medical care had been brought so low.

“You drugged me.” Nausea, chattering teeth, that impenetrable haze, and the shakes? Drugs are the only answer.

“Fuck yes I did! And _filthy!_ Dirt everywhere, a pack of shit-bags shooting at me, couldn’t get you behind cover, I had to do something, so I shot ‘em full of spikes, and then I stuck you with the Psycho, and...and... _and I almost lost you!”_

With no more anger to keep her propped up, she begins to cry, and Charon has no earthly idea what to do. He wants to touch her, to wind his fingers in her hair like he does when she blubbers over the deaths of fictional dogs or when gripped by nightmares, but she is flighty and slightly unhinged, so he keeps his hands to himself and says the first thing he can think of.

“I am fortunate,” he tells her softly, and the words are so starkly true, he can only wonder at them.

For her part, she stops crying long enough to stare at him as if a cactus had tasked her with three riddles.

“Fortun- are you crazy?! I stuck a needle the size of Texas in your left ventricle! I had to use two! _I never even gave you a choice!”_ she wails, tears and hiccups starting up again with a vengeance.

There it is. The reaction like she had done something unforgivable, it explains everything, and he cannot imagine how she had ever crossed his path and decided to pull him off it and take him on her own.

“It was not a choice I was able to make. But next time, try to give some advance warning. I would have been in more control.”

“Control?!” she squeaks, almost offendedly swiping at her eyes. “How could you be in control? They call it ‘Psycho’ for a reason! _”_

He shrugs. It is simply a byproduct of intense training. Anyone who refused to break - or in his case, was unable - could do it.

“Special Forces personnel were trained in its use before the War. And experimental shock troops such as myself...”

“Let me guess. They bathed you in the stuff.”

“For all intents and purposes, yes. The process was...painful. I prefer not to use it. It only becomes a crutch.”

She snorts at him through her subsiding tears and something tight unclenches inside. “For you, maybe. I take it and trip balls.”

She is beautiful despite the necklace of bruises she wears.

Graceful and strong with its corded muscle, her neck is still so very delicate and he can see a dark ring beginning to form under the soft skin there, and it is a punch to the gut that almost takes his breath away. A few moments more, a few more pounds of pressure, and he would have killed her.

“I have hurt you again,” he says through gritted teeth, and he simply cannot understand how this keeps happening, how he keeps breaking the only good thing he has.

Her hand steals up to her throat, fingers feathering over the bruised flesh without actually touching it, and she _smiles_ at him again, a smile full of something that resembles relief.

“Looks like we both have things to be sorry for. Let's call it a draw.” She sticks her hand out to be shaken with the pinky out, a childish a gesture of peace and promise.

A ‘draw’, she says, as if using any and all means necessary to pull him back from the brink of death is remotely similar to attempted murder. Looking into her face, he studies her eyes, examines the tilt of her brow, the set of her jaw, but can find no trace of resentment, no streaks of animosity to be used against him later when he least expects it. Charon decides that he has officially gone mad, and that someone with some clout should really start doing something about it, because never in this life or possibly in the past one would he ever consider a ‘pinky-swear’.

He lets her little finger wrap around his big ruined one and solemnly shakes it.

“A draw, then. Although, how is Psycho different from the Med-X you used last time?”

Her eyes are anguished again, and he mentally kicks himself.

“At least Med-X takes the pain away and doesn't make any more. But Psycho...it takes the walls down. Cracks you wide open and lets all the mean out.”

“True. But that does not answer my question.”

She crosses her arms and huffs at him. “There’s no way I was going to do surgery without an analgesic! What do you think I am, a butcher?!”

“My mistake,” he replies with a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth because he vastly prefers her tart to her tears.

“You're damn right,” she growls. “Now let me take a look at you.”

This fussing she does over him, it is habit now, too. She checks him over with her doctor's eyes, quick and capable, tsking at the burns and cuts on his neck and arms and angrily clucking over the state of his palms.

“Well, you look like warm poo, big guy,” she says cheerfully.

“Thank you so much,” he grouses back. “Is that your professional diagnosis?”

“Don't be so salty. And yes. ‘Warm poo’ is a technical term. At least you're not CTD.”

“CTD?”

She grins with her white teeth and while there is teasing there, it is followed by something else, residual guilt mixed with relief, perhaps. “Circling the drain.”

“How descriptive.”

“Mmmhmm. A systemic stimpak and a good dinner and you'll be right as rain.”

As she gently applies the stimpak and some sort of herbal-smelling ointment on the worst of the cuts and burns, he notices the quiet. The caterwaul of boo-hooing man downstairs has stopped and it is suspiciously silent.

“Jabsco?” he queries.

She grimaces. “Utter cockface.”

While it is an answer of sorts, it is not new information.

“He is still armed?”

“Mmhmm. But he can only shoot through the garbage hole. I shut the door on him, so now he can’t even do that.”

“And if he escapes?”

She shakes her head and the computer on her wrist. “Pip-boy says it's a closet. Solid steel floor, walls, ceiling, everything. No duct work, either. Dumbass hid in a coffin.”

“And if he commits suicide?”

“He's too much of a snivelling slit to shoot himself. Not yet anyway.”

That, at least, is probably true.

“So you have a plan for dealing with him, I assume?”

She smiles, a small one, crypt-quiet and shrapnel-sharp.

“I gave him options. Reminded him that death by dehydration is pretty painful. Made it clear that I’ve got nothing but clean water and time.”

That is also true. She had the Mr. Handy that haunts her house rattling overtime to make bottles on bottles of fresh water. And they had scavenged enough from this base for weeks. But it is the psychological torment rather than the physical that is such an interesting approach. More time-consuming, yes, but it can also be more fruitful. And with a coward like Jabsco, Charon thinks they will be headed home within the day.

So they settle in to wait, amicably passing the time together. She grills some kind of meat, and paired with a bottle of water (irradiated for him, clean for her) Instamash, and two mutfruits apiece, it is one of the best meals he has had in a long time, if only because he is ravenous.

Necessities now taken care of, the real waiting begins. The books have all been read through and since both are too keyed up to read them anyway, they are at loose ends.

“Wanna play a game?” she asks. “Or take a nap? You've got to be exhausted.”

Charon is a step or two beyond exhausted, but something electric ghosts along his jittery nerves, making sleep impossible.

“A game?”

“Well, yeah. A game. You know, where two people compete against each other…”

Charon gives her a look, the one that says she is not nearly as amusing as she thinks she is.

“Woah, jeez, okay!” she says, shielding her face from what she had described as ‘the death glare’. “Do do you wanna play or not?”

“What is this game?”

“Dunno if it has a name,” she says, taking a spare bootlace out of her pack and tying the ends together. “Me and Amata just called it ‘Strings’. We used to play when they put us on decon.”

“Decon?”

“Yep. Hold out your hands, no not that way,” she says, turning his hands and fingers this way and that until she is satisfied. “The vault ran - er, runs, I guess - decontamination sequences. Makes sure there’s no outside bacteria getting in. Okay, so the string wraps around this way…”

Charon tries not to think about how many more seconds it will take him to get to his shotgun with his fingers trussed up like a turkey, but pushes it away because she has his fingers in hers and is telling him about things he thinks she has told no one else.

“We had to stay in our rooms until our quadrant was finished,” she says, pinching two X’s of strings and flipping them upside- down to make a different, flatter shape. “Took hours sometimes. So ‘Mata would sneak in my room before lockdown, and it was just us for a little while. It was nice. Okay, so pull those two strings with your pinky fingers and flip...um, not quite, but good try.”

The string has become hopelessly tangled and while Charon has the sneaking suspicion that this game has no rules or point system, he stubbornly refuses to quit. Especially when her fingers are so carefully untangling his own.

She patiently starts again, letting him figure out the layers of strings for himself. “I remember it tasted bad. Like chewing on aluminum foil and wet dirt. Made everything foggy, too. It would have been better to play cards, but you couldn't see three inches in front of your face, so it was easier to play Strings and talk.”

They play this ‘Strings’ game and she babbles about her vault and about all the people in it. He asks questions sometimes, but mostly listens. She tells him about Bea and the terrible poetry, about the small grease-ball gang that tormented nearly everyone, about hiding in the ductwork when she wanted to be alone, about cake baking contests (which she never participated in for obvious reasons), about how Amata had like-liked Christine and Christine like-liked her back (her words, not his), but how girls married boys and not other girls because two girls could not make more children.

Charon listens and his Mistress talks of ‘vault depressive syndrome’ and how everyone was on pills to combat it, how they had made it easier for a time, but the side effects had been so severe she had stopped taking them.

“Dry mouth, tremors, forgetfulness. I couldn't study like that. So I just threw them away.”

“Humans are not meant to live without the sun,” he tells her, suddenly wondering what lasting effects her sleep schedule might have.

“No, they're not,” she agrees with a look of distaste. “But don't worry, we had pills for that too.” She shakes her head. “I'm surprised nobody went nuts and shot up the place. But I guess all those pills kept everybody calm enough. Only thing out here like it is Med-X, but it's way too strong to use as a daily therapy.”

The string tangles yet again and as her fingers dance all over the ruined skin of his own his without any sign of disgust, Charon decides he likes this game very much. Finally, though, he gets through to what is apparently the ‘end’.

“Who won?” he asks.

“No one,” she replies. “It’s just to pass the time. Why don't you lay down for a minute. Give that stimpak a chance to work.”

Charon is bone-tired. He can feel it behind his eyes, wave after wave of it crashing into his skull, his entire body demanding rest. He shifts to get up and find an out of the way place to lay down, but his Mistress motions for him to stay. Like she had in her own home and all the other times they have been out traveling, she makes a bed for him as best as she can. And using both his and her own bedrolls, it is almost sumptuous-looking. Sitting next to the head of it, she pats her thigh.

“I'll be your pillow if you want,” she offers quietly, allowing him to say no, but Charon knows the last thing he wants is to refuse. He is just so _tired._ So he lays down with his head on her thigh, staring at the ceiling and waiting for sleep to come.

It does, but not as quickly as he would like. After almost an hour of studying the steel beams of the ceiling and counting their rivets, she huffs at him.

“You need to relax.”

Charon knows that, but it is easier said than done.

Slowly, so slowly, she reaches her hand to his face but stops just short, an unspoken question. He nods once, and the cool pads of her fingertips brush along his forehead, doing their best to smooth out the tension there. Charon had heard the saying ‘putty in their hand’, but had always thought it a figurative rather than a literal phrase.

He is sorely mistaken.

The tiny hand cups the side of his face so carefully, as if he might be something breakable, and the flinch that would have come months ago is nowhere to be found. His eyes close as a thumb traces where the red hair of his eyebrow used to be, taking the ache away with the soft, repetitive motions, and he sleepily wonders how she can stand to touch him.

It is only when she answers him that he realizes he has asked such a ridiculous question out loud.

“Cuz I like you, goofy. Now go to sleep.”

_Lucky likes Charon._

Charon does not understand it, could never, even if given two more centuries, understand it. But he dimly supposes some things in life are just not meant to be understood.

 

**********

 

He wakes slowly, stretching joints that let out delicious pops and cracks. Something soft under his head that smells like his Mistress, and he stupidly remembers that he had fallen asleep with his head on her lap like a child. Looking up, he expects to see her face, but only sees the metal ceiling. Charon finds that sometime in his sleep, she had replaced that gorgeous thigh with her jacket, and he feels irrationally cheated.

But there are voices now, one calm, one terrified. He listens, and hears a thud of flesh against flesh, a metallic clang, and howl of what could only be described as absolute rage. That is enough to make him snatch up his shotgun and sprint in search of her.

But she is not harmed. His Mistress stands in front of the wall of junk, an unfamiliar revolver in her hand. He knows it is not hers because the sluggish reload speed of the .44 sent her into absolute fits.

 _“But why?!”_ she had complained in a moan that scaled up at the end as she faced down a charging yao guai. _“What's the fucking point?!”_ she had shrieked, finally throwing the emptied revolver at its face in an overhand heater to put a major league pitcher to shame. The yao guai had likely never seen such a tactic, because it screeched to a halt and looked around confusedly before Charon separated its head from its body with three well-placed combat slugs. _“Never again, Charon!”,_ she had yelled at him, as if it were his fault revolvers were meant to used on much smaller game than over-irradiated bears.

Here and now, she plays with it, and the way she absently spins the cylinder and snaps it back announces that it is unloaded. _Spin, snap. Spin, snap._ Motions almost an afterthought, like pulling at a loosely threaded button, but Charon can see the calculation in it, sees the way Jabsco looks at it longingly and Charon also knows she had somehow taken it from him. He had probably pointed it at her through the hole and she with her lightning quickness had slapped it right out of his hand.

“Did you get the gift I sent?” she asks.

Stony silence.

“You've just been working so hard,” she says, almost flirtatious, “I thought you might want a little something for your trouble.”

“You're pretty sick, lady.”

She shrugs as if it is both true and she had been called much worse.

“Yeah, I got it,” Jabsco finally says. “Mikey was one of my best lieutenants.”

“Bled out?”

“Infection.”

“Awww. That's too bad. And it couldn’t of happened to a nicer guy.”

“Yeah. So what do you want? Caps? Guns?”

“Nuh-uh. You hurt someone I care about.” The saccharin of her voice is as dangerous as poisoned fruit.

“It was just business. You know how it is,” Jabsco says quickly.

“Hmm,” she considers, cocking her head to listen to the whirring clicks of the spinning cylinder. “Business. Is business having one of your boys try to rape me?”

“No! I told them not to hurt you!”

“That’s right. So I'd be nice and fresh for you. Because nobody likes their meat rancid, right?”

“Fine,” Jabsco says miserably. “I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. Allistair Tenpenny. That’s who put out the contract.”

“You know why?”

“No. Just that your bounty was high.”

“How high?”

“5000 caps.”

A low whistle through clenched teeth. “Big spender, huh? Well, no wonder you worked so hard. But not you, really. _You_ didn’t do much of anything.”

Jabsco says nothing, but his eyes say everything.

His Mistress smiles again, puts a single .44 cartridge in an off-chamber, softly clicks it shut, and tosses Jabsco the gun through the hole that Charon had torn his palms open to create.

“Don’t say I never did anything for you.”

He screams at her but it is lost behind the screech of metal as she rolls the door closed. With a few tweaks of her fingers and a vicious twist of her screwdriver she does something loud and final to the locking mechanism and simply walks away. The dog follows at her side and Charon ghosts behind as screams made metallic float around them.

On the surface, it is quiet. The dawn is coming again, rosy-orange in the east. His Mistress walks into it, lifts her face and closes her eyes, letting the first rays touch her skin and does not flinch from it.

She finally turns and looks at him, tired and sad.

“Tell me I’m not a monster.”

“You are not a monster,” he tells her immediately, but Charon knows she does not believe him.

 

**********

 

They do their due diligence, ensuring that Jabsco’s death sentence is completed. She sleeps only a little and spends her waking hours buzzing here, there, and everywhere like a busy bee preparing for winter. He briefly wonders if she plans on moving in, but she only cleans the areas she has designated their bedrooms and makeshift kitchen, so he thinks not. She makes sure to wait at the compound, sniping any Talon Company stragglers stupid enough to keep calling Fort Banister home. And at first, there is no lack of targets. But it has been silent and still for a few days now. She does her best to turn the fort upside down, scrounging any useful thing she could get her hands on - food, water, ammunition, weapons, armor - she takes it all.

On one such excursion, about four days into their occupation, a shot rings out, muffled and metallic. It is apparent that Jabsco is no more. Her head swings up from the Talon Company armor she had been working so hard on - a replacement for his other ruined chestpiece.

“Charon?”

“Yes?”

She runs her finger along a fresh weld, testing the smoothness of her work.

“How do you handle it?”

“Handle what?”

“All the blood.”

Charon takes in a long breath and releases it slowly before formulating an answer. On the face of it, the question is insane, but on the other side, he understands it intimately.

“If they deserve it, I spare no tears.”

“And if they don't?”

She sees too deep, too far underneath his skin for her own good.

“I do my best to kill two more that did.”

Armor forgotten, she considers him, weighs both him and his worth with those grey eyes, sharp like the scalpel she wields so delicately.

“So a balanced equation is enough?”

“No. But our best is all we have.”

She applies her considerable gears and cogs to turn his words over and over in her mind until she has examined them from all their many angles, but seems to have no firmer grasp than when she started.

 

**********

 

They trek to the river crossing, either to go home and lick their wounds or press on to visit Tenpenny. She has not told him where they are going, and he does not want to ask.

“Allistair Tenpenny,” she says suddenly. “Have you heard of him?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have an opinion?”

“Impotent scum,” he growls. “In a bathrobe.”

“That’s...oddly specific.”

Charon grunts because the last thing he wants to do is dwell on any thought of Allistair Tenpenny.

“Perhaps. But it is no less true.”

“I’m gonna just go ahead and assume you two have history.”

“One could say that.”

“Old employer?”

“No. But many of my employers had dealings with him at one time or another. I distinctly remember he had certain...proclivities.”

“Such as?”

Charon does not know how to explain this delicately.

“Feet,” he finally blurts, and perhaps it is better this way, like pulling the bandage off an old wound.

Her face rearranges itself from slightly depressed to comically horrified.

“What?!” she splutters, hands beginning to fidget. “What? He like-likes feet? His feet?”

Charon shakes his head.

“Sweet baby Jesus. Other people’s feet? But why though? What does he want the feet for?”

“I am sure I have no idea.”

What was comically horrified becomes almost ill as the gears and cogs turn rapidly.

“Please tell me it's not corpse feet. Tell me it's at least live feet.”

“Live feet, I believe. Specifically, he enjoys being stepped on. Hard.”

Slight illness to disbelief. “Stepped on.”

“Yes,” he says, and is suddenly glad he does not have much skin left to blush with.

“Stepped on,” she repeats softly to herself, as if she simply cannot wrap her head around it. With a violent shake that seems to be a bid to shake the idea right out of her head, she shrugs. “Everybody's got their something, I guess. Totally gonna call him Tootsies now though.”

Charon laughs outright at ‘Tootsies’ and a small weight seems to lift from them both.

“So, we got a plan for Tootsies then, knowing his…’proclivities’?” she asks, waggling her eyebrows suggestively.

 _“I_ would prefer to put a .308 between his eyes. It would be fitting.”

“So there's more to the story than kinky feet stuff.”

“Much more. He considers the Wasteland his personal playground. Fancies himself a sniper. His preferred game are unwary ghoul travellers that get too close to the tower. He likes to shoot them from his balcony.”

“So a ghoul hater.”

“Yes. He thinks us less than animals.”

“Is it too far to take him out while he’s on the balcony?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“So what do you know about the tower?”

He tells her what he knows of Tenpenny Tower, of its upper bourgeoisie inhabitants. How only a select few - presentable or well-to-do - would be allowed in to visit, and only the beautiful or rich would be allowed to stay.

She thinks hard, gears and cogs ratcheting up into problem-solving speeds, and by the look on her face, the conclusion she comes to is less than desirable.

“I don't wanna,” she says as she crosses her arms and _pouts._

“Want to what?”

“Well, you can't go, they'd never let you in. I can, but only if I’m ‘desirable’. And he likes feet.”

“I do not understand.”

She swings sharply towards Megaton and treads with purpose.

“Don't worry about it. Nova will know what to do.”

 

**********

 

“So, feet huh? I don't envy you, sugar. Not one bit.”

His Mistress gives a morose look to the cinnamon-haired barkeep. How interesting how a change in vocation could change an entire person. Nova looks _happy,_ blindingly, exquisitely, uncontrollably happy.

“Feet?” Gob asks, looking up from where he has been sitting down on the floor,  playing with the dog’s ears and making them flap.

“Lucky’s got a man problem,” Nova says, and while she keeps the grin off her face, she cannot seem to keep it out of her voice.

“Sure. Laugh it up in my hour of need.”

“Not laughing. Just gotta poke a little.”

“Alright, you've poked. Now can you do it or not?”

“Do what?” Charon and Gob ask in close to perfect unison.

“Oh no. This is girl talk. You boys stay down here,” Nova says, dragging a martyred-looking Mistress up the stairs after her.

“What are they doing?” Charon demands, but Gob just shrugs and keeps playing with the dog's ears, now rolling them up from top to bottom and whispering ‘sausage ear’. The dog is completely limp on the floor, perfectly content to let itself be fiddled with.

Charon asks again, louder this time, and while Gob starts a bit at the volume, he keeps his spot on the floor. Charon can see something fundamental has changed. Perhaps he had grown up.

“Who knows? Nova says stay down here, I stay down here. Besides, it's girl stuff,” Gob says, folding the ears lengthwise into ‘tacos’ and halfway into ‘hamburgers’.

Girl stuff. As if that explained such dark-alley plots and secret-password subterfuge.

Long minutes pass. Hours perhaps. The radio plays a string of Billie Holiday songs he cannot remember the names of, soft female giggles and sounds of running water float over the railing, sharp staccato taps and more giggles, the dog ears are made into more fantastic food items, and finally, Charon loses it at ‘cannoli’.

The question - the one question that had been eating at his brain like a disease ever since Gob had asked it months ago - it had followed Charon around the Wasteland like a nail in the sole of his boot, pricking every time he took a step. He thought about it at night when they walked, he thought about it before he went to sleep, and it was almost the first thing he thought of when he woke up. Finally, it beats its way past his thick skull and finds its way onto his tongue and out of his mouth.

“How did you get Nova to like you?”

Gob lets go of the ears he had been making the dog wear like a ‘pancake hat’ and they spring back upright.

“Uh, that's kind of a loaded question.”

“Nevermi-”

“No, it's fine. I think she was just sick of everybody. Everything. She just got so fed up with it all, she went and grabbed the complete opposite, I guess. Not gonna complain though.”

“That is not helpful. My Mistress is not-”

“Well, for starters, stop calling her that,” Gob says sharply, and Charon is reminded again just how much Gob had changed. “I know Ahzrukhal had you do some shitty stuff, but she's not him.”

“I know that,” Charon grinds out.

“Then treat her like it. She'll think you don't care about her. You do care about her, right?”

“Yes,” Charon grudgingly admits, and it is true. He does care about her. How far that goes, he is still not sure.

“And not just because you have to?”

“No.”

“Okay, good,” Gob says. “She’s my favorite person besides Nova.”

At the mere mention of Nova’s name, Gob gets an absolutely idiotic grin and Charon thinks he has never seen a ghoul so disgustingly radiant, excepting the Glowing Ones in Barrows office. Charon stares at him a moment, considers him, picks him apart in his mind in an attempt to understand.

He finds next to nothing.

There is nothing special about Gobtholemew. He owns a bar, yes, but he was just as ruined and broken as any other ghoul. Kind and a bit soft around the edges, but not particularly interesting or well spoken, well-traveled or charismatic. Charon cannot understand it. There must be something else. Something he said or did.

“But _how?”_

Gob looks slightly uncomfortable, but Charon could give a rat’s ass less and it must show, because Gob finally starts to babble.

“That's just it. I dunno. I can't figure it out either. One day, Moriarty’s here and we’re both miserable, the next, she broke my nose and I told her I loved her and then it rained and she was all wet and crying and then she kissed me and now she hardly lets me sleep.”

Gob had gone from uncomfortable to excited and rambling and now is back to _very_ uncomfortable, and Charon had not learned anything except that something rare had happened.

A ghoul is truly happy and and far as Charon can tell, had done nothing to deserve it.

While Charon is trying his damndest to solve this particular brand of calculus, something even more rare comes down the stairs.

His Mistress. _Lucky,_ he sternly reminds himself. Lucky in a blue dress. But it is not the dress that has made his mouth go dry.

Lucky is in _heels._

Vaguely, in the back of his mind, a memory, but he tamps it down, too focused on the now to deal with the blonde woman’s own black heels as they dance the foxtrot at an officers’ gala. Hips swaying as she steps carefully down the stairs, Charon is quite sure he has never seen anything like it.

Her hair is braided like normal, except softer somehow, a red ribbon woven through the curls. Something is different with her face, too - lips redder, eyes larger. The blue dress swirls around her legs as she descends the stairs, falling demurely right below her knees. Her arms are bare but just a bit of skin shows through the neckline, and the way it nips in at the waist, floating just over her hips to softly flaunt her curves and lines in a way that Charon can definitely appreciate.

Yes, the dress is nice, but the shoes…

They are red and add at least four inches to her slight frame and her legs seems to know what to do with each inch because the calf muscle swells under her skin and the tips of her toes peek out. They are painted like the night he had first seen them, but now the paint is fresh and perfect and as shockingly red as poisoned berries and Charon can only wonder if he too has developed a taste for ‘kinky feet stuff’.

Her legs might know what to do with the heels, but she apparently does not, because something gets caught somewhere and she trips over her own feet.

Charon finds he has migrated to the bottom of the stairs not quite of his own volition and catches her before her face hits the floor grate. She is light in his arms, and with her face buried in his chest, the scent of her hair crystallizes in his lungs and short circuits his brain. And when she looks up at him with those wide grey eyes - still a tiny bird, but one that now understands the breadth and width of its world and remains completely and utterly unafraid - something remarkable happens.

The poles shift, the axis of the earth tilts, and he dimly realizes that nothing will ever be the same again because he loves her.

_Charon loves Lucky._

And then inexplicably, panic. A fear so deep and old it crackles with elemental energy as it pulses through both brain and body, and Charon does what can only be described as either a futile exercise in self-defense or the pinnacle of cowardice.

He pushes her to arm’s length and stalks away to lean up against the wall. Silent. Ready. Empty.

Safe.

Her face crumples, but just as quickly she laughs, light as air and with about as much substance. Hands quick, she talks to Nova with them, smiling and laughing but Charon can barely hear their conversation for the roaring in his ears.

“Isn’t she just gorgeous?!” Nova asks him pointedly.

Charon gives a noncommittal grunt because his Mistress is so beautiful it hurts.

Gob and the dog know. They are both still and quiet on the floor, looking back and forth between Charon and his Mistress. Charon scares off the bipedal one with what his Mistress had dubbed the ‘don't fuck with me‘ stare, but the canine has no such societal restraints. It begins to whine, pacing back and forth from one to the other and licking at both their hands.

“Your dog okay, sugar?”

“Dogmeat’s just hungry,” she says brightly as a light bulb just before it blows. “Better get home and get you fed, huh cutie-butt?” She distracts the dog with her ‘puppy voice’ and knuckle rubbed between its eyes, and while temporarily appeased, it is still anxious, sticking close by her side.

They take their leave, his Mistress giving and receiving hugs before she and the dog duck out the door. Charon follows at a respectful distance, but a hand gripping his arm has his fist moments from swinging into Gob’s face.

“You’re making a mistake,” Gob says low in his throat, low enough that this conversation only includes the two of them now.

Charon says nothing, but stares at the hand on his arm. Gob wisely removes it, shrugging his shoulders and looking disappointed _,_ as if Charon were a wayward child that had done something foolish.

“It is better this way,” Charon grinds out.

“Right. So much better.”

Charon wants to snap back with either words or violence, but Nova is getting too close, picking up on the tension almost as easily as the hound.

“See ya around,” Gob says cheerfully as Charon stalks out. His face does not match his tone.

Charon hears them whispering to each other as he closes the door.

“He looked like he saw a ghost,” Nova says.

“Maybe he did,” Gob replies back.

“Think he’ll be okay?”

“Nope.”

 

**********

 

It is raining. Softly, though - more of a heavy mist than rain, but enough to cover everything in a light patina of moisture.

His Mistress and the dog had tucked themselves safely inside the house and had not said a word to him, so now he is on the roof as the mist curls through the town, watching it dim the lights and listens as it dampens all the sounds of the world.

Charon has fled to the highest place he could scramble both to be alone and to try to get the rain to wash her away.

It is slow going.

Emptying himself of her is no small task, impossible at worst, herculean at best. He is not a simple vessel to be tipped upside down so she could be sedately poured out. Instead, she has latched her velvet fingers into every little crevice they could possibly find purchase, and they are as tenacious as they are sharp. He had not understood the level of pervasiveness until that stark moment that Charon thinks he had only felt one other time with the blonde woman on the boat.

But even this is different. More fire, more violence, more blood. Blood, both his and hers, all bound up and twisted together and he just cannot seem to stuff her into one of the file cabinets of his mind. She goes kicking and screaming, holding on to the edges of the box and refusing to be packed away. The panic rises up hungry as thoughts of her reach critical mass and his brain detonates with both recent memory and past intertwined.

 

_Blue eyes on him as she steps into her new dress. It clings as she slides it up over her body. She turns her back to him and as he pulls up the the zipper for her, each inch of skin is mournfully kissed as it disappears under the fabric._

Her hair wild and willful in the morning. She growls as she does battle, a little dance of victory after she pummels it into submission.

_She sings in the shower when she thinks he can’t hear. Some notes are too high or low for her to reach, but the middle ones curl up soft into the steam._

Her voice when she reads is still water, quiet but deep, tongue wrapping itself around each word, considering it carefully before letting it go out into the world.

_She dances as she cleans the kitchen, hands busy with hips busier as she single-handedly turns his house into a home._

She tinkers, deft fingers dancing over her newest project, and when she catches him watching, she looks up at him and smiles bright and beautiful, a smile fit to end the world.

 

Head between his knees, his panted breathing is as hard and harsh as if he had finished a long run, but there is no Mistress this time to pet his wrist and share something profound. No one to tell him everything will be alright or at least distract him with stories about the stars.

Charon understands now that the punishment for all his past misdeeds was never intended to be hell. Not fire or brimstone or even something more abstract as a metaphorical pit of coals. No, his penance is to suffer in silence at her side, to love her and say nothing.

For the first time in his life, he wishes for Ahzrukhal because even that would hurt less.

 

**********

 

Charon makes breakfast like normal.

Scrambled mirelurk eggs firm up while shredded brahmin steak sizzles hot in a pan. Normal sounds on a normal morning, but this morning is not normal and has not been normal for several days now.

It is the silence.

But Charon can work with silence, has learned through his long years to let it stretch out languid and poisonous, learned to draw it around himself like a shroud and wear it much longer than anyone else.

So he had and she lasted four whole days.

“You don't want to be friends anymore, do you.”

Accusation rather than question from the couch in the living room, knees drawn up into her chest and lonely.

“No,” he forces himself to say. It is not a lie, per say - if it was, it would have choked him - but if not ‘being friends’ is the only way to rid himself of her clutching, velvet fingers, then yes, it is at least a half-truth.

A switch flips now as he watches her from the corner of his eye. A body blow to the solar plexus, the air rushing silent out of her lungs as she curls up into herself. But she straightens, brave as she is, and forces her limbs to relax until she is the very picture of nonchalance.

“Alright.”

She smiles at him and it looks like a dead thing.

 

**********

 

Charon had known full well that this change was going to be uncomfortable - uncomfortable silences, awkward attempts at conversation, stuttering starts and stops of words and sentiments given and not returned. Of feelings so hurt and trampled upon it would be palpable. But she would eventually forget him as a friend, would finally understand exactly what he was. Yes. In a word, Charon decided it would be uncomfortable.

But no one had told him it would be excruciating.

It is not the silence or the injured glances or how she still carefully ensures his every immediate need is met. While it is not exactly painless, these things are tolerable, a difficulty to be borne without complaint. Simply a dull ache, not the stab he had anticipated.

Until she stops touching him.

It had started slow - a scritch at the back of his neck, the twitch of his fingers as they seek her hair, the distinct feeling that his skin is a simply a shell - much too small, too tight to ever have been his. An annoyance like biting flies, not a large or particularly painful affliction, but one that carries on and on until it drives him mad, burrowing its way into his bloodstream, clawing and scraping like a fractious beast straining to get out.

But she is far from him now, even as they hike to Tenpenny Tower. She had told him she preferred to go alone, but he had not wanted to abandon her. The contract is the contract, and it still lives nestled in her flesh, after all.

“I follow you for good or for ill,” he had told her.

“I know.”

She walks, eight feet away from him now instead of eight inches. His fingers itch for her, but he curls them into his palms, squeezes, and carries on.

They settle down to camp, tasks still divided equally. She still makes his bed, still places it close to the fire so as to be warm when he gets in it after his watch, but she sets her own on the other side and sleeps with her back to him.

She does not read anymore.

 

**********

 

They arrive a quarter of a mile from Tenpenny Tower, and she stops at a small outcropping of rock. She asks him to turn around, so he does, scouting the perimeter.

When he returns, the sight of her in the dress and heels with her hair done up soft does something to his gut that feels suspiciously like being stabbed with a rusty pocket knife. But the big grey eyes that look up at him are something beyond sad, something empty, and that is enough to feel a different type of a stab somewhere in his side, poison-edged with regret.

She asks him (no commands yet, but they will come soon enough, he supposes) to stay back while she approaches the tower, and while he understands the necessity, Charon does not like it. He tracks her movements through his scope and can do nothing but watch and worry.

She arrives at the gate to a small slice of chaos.

The security guard refuses to talk to a ghoul who, even through the scope, Charon immediately does not like. His demeanor, the way he carries himself, it all screams ‘bully’. He yells at the guard through the intercom, eventually throwing rocks at the gate like a toddler throwing a tantrum.

His Mistress, eternally kind, speaks with him, head nodding sympathetically. Charon tries to ignore the way the ghoul’s eyes slide over her, how they run along her curves and lines and linger over her lips. The ghoul seems only partially placated by her words and body, because he throws what appears to be an insult in her face and stalks away in the direction of a subway access.

The ghoul gone, his Mistress takes a moment to flip him off behind his back with both hands and Charon barely strangles the laugh that bubbles its way up out of his throat.

She takes a deep breath in and releases it slow, looking like she might be working up the courage to leap off a cliff. Leaning up against the wall with one hip cocked out ever so slightly, she speaks into the intercom. She touches her hair, fingers the neckline of her dress as she flirts with a wall and a voice through a speaker and Charon wants to scream.

She is let in readily enough and disappears from sight.

A whole afternoon passes into evening.

Charon is still for hours, absently petting the dog’s ears and now understands Gob’s fascination. There is something intrinsically calming about the silky fur between his fingers. It is only when he realizes it is calming because he had grown used to doing this with his Mistress’s own soft curls that he drops his hand to his side and begins to pace.

It is twilight when she returns, tottering in her heels and sighing in relief as she sits on the ground like a child and peels them off with a grimace.

“Blisters,” she says absently, and the backs of both heels are now home to blisters that are large enough to be proper wounds. She cleans and bandages them, and as she softly yelps at the sting of disinfectant, Charon hopes all the pain was worth it.

“He _really_ liked feet,” she snickers to herself.

“Liked?” he asks.

She nods, ghost of a smile pulling at her lips like a good memory as she dangles one of the heels off a finger and he notices that one stiletto is much redder than the other. “I must have stepped too hard. On his eye.”

Charon does not want to know what she had to do to get that close to the lecherous old man, but on the other hand, desperately does.

“What did you do with the body?” he asks, and while he has been trying to be the pure embodiment of silence, some things still need to be asked. For tactical reasons, obviously.

“Well, I wanted to throw him off the balcony past the fence and let the dogs eat him, but he was really heavy. Would have landed on Gustavo and then I'd be in really big trouble.”

“So?”

“So, I um...I kind of stuffed him in a footlocker.”

The physics required to stuff a full grown man into a footlocker are baffling, and his face must say so.

“Well, I mean, I never said he was in one piece.”

Practical. But Charon had expected nothing less.

Blisters wrapped, she pulls on her combat boots. The combination of dusty, battle-worn boots with fresh, innocent dress makes certain things stir that he attempts to forcefully put down.

“We gotta go meet Roy,” she tells him.

Charon does not want to go meet this Roy. Charon wants to pin her to the damp dirt and see just how filthy he can get the light cotton of her dress when he drives himself into her and she cries out his name as she scores his back with her nails-

His attempts at misdirection are dismally unsuccessful.

She, unaware of his filthy state of mind, sets off for the subway access, dress billowing between her legs to create a perfect outline of her entire back half, and Charon wonders if he was created simply to suffer.

 

**********

 

They talk, his Mistress and this ghoul, and Charon does not like it.

“They'll let you move in,” she tells Roy happily. “It wasn’t even that hard.”

“What about Tenpenny? He agreed?”

The glance she gives is ephemeral, and Charon knows what it means because it is almost the same fleeting expression she gave him right before she promised to use the Stealth Boy and abandon him if he died. Almost. Charon thinks that only he and perhaps a very few others can read that subtle shift of countenance that she does only rarely and out of the utmost necessity.

It means if she does not lie ouright, she at least skirts around the truth.

“I can be pretty persuasive.”

“I bet you can,” Roy says, almost purring as he drifts closer to her, stalking her movements and Charon can do nothing but clench his fists and try to keep silent.

He fails.

Roy is at least intelligent enough to be  aware of his surroundings, because his glance swings to Charon who looms large and dangerous.

“You might want to get a leash on your bodyguard. He’s growling.”

His Mistress looks right at Charon and says something he had always pessimistically expected, but had not yet heard.

“Charon is very good at his job.”

It is bitter when she says it, both sad and acidic, but he thinks only he would notice those sounds in her voice.

“I can tell. Must cost a fortune.”

“Yeah.”

Picking at a seam in her dress, she is uncomfortable, but Roy sees it as a weakness, an indecisiveness that could be overcome with flattery precisely applied.

“Would you like to stay the night? It's a lot safer here than out there. Especially for such a pretty girl.”

“I couldn’t impose…” she trails off demurely.

“Not at all. You've done a good thing for us, so it's the least I can do.” He touches her forearm, not friendly, but a flirt. Her narrowed eyes, tight at the corners and dark, say the touch is unwelcome. He does not see, running a hand up to her bicep. “We don't have too many beds,” he croons, “but you can sleep in mine-”

A few things happen at once.

She yanks her arm back and his hand clutches at her soft skin for less than a moment, and Charon snaps. He grips the offending wrist, twisting the arm at the elbow and whipping it behind the back until the bones tweak and Roy is forced to sink to his knees. A rustle at the door, a flurry of pink skirts as the female ghoul - who had probably seen and heard everything and could have shot either of them without much trouble - turns with a kicked-dog look and flees.

“Bess!” he calls after the spy, but she has a head start and he is not any position to follow. He struggles, but Charon only pulls harder until he yelps.

“Charon.”

His name a two-syllable staccato, a directionless command. No teeth behind it, though - not a true order. Charon has been slipping back into old habits and decides now is time to slip just a little further.

Even though he desperately wants to break the wrist, he stops just short, satisfied for now to hear the tendons softly pop and feel the ligaments stretch just a bit too far. But he does not let go because she has not commanded him to.

Another small layer of emptiness, a thin piece of armor that will just have to do because is the only kind he knows how to make.

“Get him off me!” Roy demands, voice shaky.

They both ignore him, locked in their own battle of wills. She looks at Charon cooly, appraisingly.

“Didn't we agree what to do with innocents?”

“No one is innocent.”

“Some are and you know it.”

He thinks of Katie softly snoring on his shoulder surrounded by corpses, of Mel with his starving face and his elevator, of Maggie and Harden breathlessly playing tag with the dog, of Carol and her red plates and brahmin steaks done rare, of Moira and her Wasteland Survival Guide that she had given out to anyone for free, and knows that while it is much easier to deny, it is true.

“This one is not,” he says, torquing just a fraction more until Roy cries out again, flinging his other arm about like a windmill, but it is as effective as waves breaking on a cliff.

“Is this really what you want?”

Question, not command. A request couched in the rhetoical, and he knows she does not mean breaking the ghoul’s arm. No, she means how far will he defy her. To what extremes is he prepared to push her away.

Charon’s grip remains steel and the ghoul writhes in pain under it.

His Mistress gives him a look, soft in the middle but hard around the edges, a plea not to make her say what would hurt her to say, but that if she feels it necessary, she will.

He stares back, daring her.

“Let him go, Charon,” she says softly, sadly.

The chip activates and it stings, unused for so long. Slower than he would have thought, the muscles of his hand release, and he almost wonders how much slower they would have relaxed had he fought it.

Roy snatches his arm tight to his chest like he hides something precious.

“Get the fuck out,” he snarls, brave when he should have the brains not to be.

His Mistress tries to hand him a stimpak but he spits at the toes of her boots. “Get out and take your dogs with you.”

She turns on her heel and walks out, actual dog stuck to her side and letting out soft growls now and again.

Charon follows, and while he has won this particular skirmish, instead of satisfaction, he feels only regret.

 

**********

 

Apparently, she has made someone in Tenpenny Tower a promise because she does not rest on the laurels of freeing herself from her hunter, of destroying a powerful merc band, or of finding a very nice home for a pack of self-proclaimed ghoul pilgrims.

No, she heads out on another journey.

She appears to know where she is going at least somewhat, because she heads straight for Smith Casey’s Garage.

Her armor is back on, and though she hobbles a bit through her healing blisters at the last few miles, they arrive at the cave where her small computer has unerringly driven her.

But not just any cave. This cave seems quiet, the silence of death and destruction long forgotten. Perhaps it is her somber mood that is catching, because the closer she gets to the mouth of the cave, partially obstructed by tumbled rock, the more hushed she seems. She treads slow and silent, as if not wanting to wake long-sleeping spirits.

They find a body, little more than a raggedly clothed skeleton lying face down. She kneels by its side, and gears and cogs spinning, she murmurs to herself while painstakingly examining it.

“Male. Dunno how old. Tall. Blunt force trauma to the back of the head. Something metal, but thin. Lead pipe? Maybe a tire iron. Yep, two broken vertebrae. Almost shattered. Wouldn't have been able to walk away from that. Fought hard, though. Boxer’s fracture, right hand. Unhealed, so it was fresh. Four broken ribs. Bad ones, probably compound. Also unhealed. Kicked while he was down? Doesn’t matter. Somebody beat the back of his head in anyway.”

She checks the body’s pockets and under its dry rotted shirt. Tugging gently, she frees a necklace, much like Charon’s own, but strung with a copper coin rather than a key.

“Argyle’s lucky penny,” she whispers reverently to herself, and he had no idea what she is talking about or why they are even here. The name ‘Argyle’ niggles in his brain and when he catches it and tugs, the radio shows he had heard over the years filter through as static memories and he scoffs that this could be _the_ Argyle.

“Dashwood asked me to look for him.”

 _Dashwood,_ she says and he scoffs again.

She ignores him, picking up a holotape off the desk and snapping it home into the receiver of her computer.

Sound plays, and a voice, rough and crass, telling how they had rounded up all the inhabitants of the cave to sell as slaves. Pieces fall together and the last few snippets of the last episode, one he had heard in Ahzrukhal’s bar at least three times a month, ring true as he looks at the body on the ground.

She has the coin in her hand, solemnly rubbing away the dust until the pads of her fingertips bring it to a burnished shine.

“Herbert will want this,” she says softly.

And so they run right back from where they came.

 

**********

 

Charon is almost stunned at the opulence of Tenpenny Tower as his Mistress strolls in like she owns the place. He had been at the Tower to do business on some of his previous masters’ orders, but had never actually been _inside_ it.

High ceilings, carpeted (if threadbare) halls, marginally clean tile floors, a revolving door that almost traps him until he watches his Mistress carefully as she defeats it (it is all in the timing) - Charon really just wants to find a dark corner to lurk in because it is all too much.

There are both smoothskins and ghouls, but something is wrong, and Charon can smell it. Electricity on the air, a charged feeling of furtive glances and sour fear. This hotel is a powder keg. It is apparent that the smoothskins are doing their best to be polite, but there is a distinct separation between the two groups.

Charon mentally shrugs and decides he does not care.

She nervously rides the jolting elevator and when it comes to a stop at some very high-up floor, she daintily steps out, making a beeline straight for room 634.

She knocks, and an man answers the door. He is wrinkled, wearing a sweater vest, and is _very_ old, somehow managing to reach an age that no one other than a ghoul or Agatha has any right to.

This, apparently, is Herbert ‘Daring’ Dashwood.

“Lucky! So good to see you! And what a dog! This is Dogmeat?”

The dog thumps its tail at the mention of his name, completely at ease with this perfect stranger.

“And who is this?” Dashwood asks, looking up into Charon’s face without a hint of fear or revulsion.

The first introduction. How would she handle it? Would she lie and call him ‘friend? Or the more appropriate ‘bodyguard’? His gaze snaps to hers and she lifts her chin defiantly in the face of his unspoken challenge.

“This is Charon.”

He wants to snort through his nose at the quickness of her wits and decides she has won this particular battle fair and square.

“Nice to meet you, Charon,” Dashwood says heartily, making a valiant attempt to shake the hand that Charon does not offer.

“Don't mind him. He's just grumpy,” his Mistress offering her own hand instead.

“Is everything alright?” Dashwood asks nervously, and Charon can see that he and his Mistress are cut from similar cloth, from good, sturdy cloth that resists fraying at the edges if they can help it.

“Oh, sure,” his Mistress snarks. “Grumpy is his default state.”

Charon could be offended, but she does speak a truth, and truly, he had brought this upon himself.

“So,” Dashwood says, offering Charon and his Mistress a chair, which she politely accepts and he declines, preferring to stand guard with his back up against the wall, “You came back to visit an old man?”

“I’m afraid I have bad news, Mr. Dashwood.”

She holds out the lucky penny in her palm, and it flashes copper under the soft light.

The man makes a small hurt sound, gently taking the penny from her, turning it over and over in his fingers.

“Thank you. I suppose I always knew, but still…”

Silence grows awkward, the old man fixated on the penny. He finally loses strength and sits heavily in the overstuffed chair next to his Mistress.

“You loved him, didn’t you?” she asks softly, voice made to draw out pain and poison alike. Herbert starts as if he had been bitten, spine ramrod straight and tense.

Charon expects him to deny it. Herbert ‘Daring’ Dashwood, fine purveyor and charmer of the fairer sex, interested in men. While not as risque as say, being a ‘ghoulfucker’, homoerotic tendencies in men were still slightly looked down upon, something to keep under wraps and behind closed doors.

It seems not even a nuclear apocalypse could shake loose the bits of foolish hatred that humanity insisted on clinging to so blindly.

But whatever thin wire that had been holding him upright seems to snap when he looks at her, and Dashwood curls in on himself.

“Argyle was...everything,” he tells them, voice rough. “We were friends first, friends for long years. Then, yes. Lovers. He was always so good to me-”

And then Herbert is spilling his guts, explaining how they met, how long years of fast friendship had taken a different turn - telling of quiet moments in the dark, the fear of rejection, of awkward advances on both sides, of a match-to-tinder attraction that had fanned itself into a steady flame.

“I couldn't have been more than fifteen when Argyle stumbled on our house. He was busted up and hungry, so my mother let him in, took care of him. He stayed and helped my father scav. They became good friends. He treated my mother like a sister. Then my parents caught a fever, passed within weeks of each other. Argyle gave me his contract, stayed with me through everything.”

At the simple word _contract,_ both he and his Mistress go stock still.

“What kind of contract?” she asks neutrally, quiet and composed even though Charon can see her tighten taut as one of Agatha’s violin strings.

“You wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

“Try me,” she says, voice still soft, but with an edge that demands answers.

“I don't know the particulars, just that he hated talking about it, so we never did. He said he wouldn’t leave as long as I kept it. I always felt terrible. Like I was making him do something he didn't want to. But he told me he was happy and that he didn't want to leave. That he just wanted me. We only had one spat over it. He told me not to lose it, but of course, I did.”

His Mistress almost chokes as she swallows wrong.

“You lost it?!” she sputters, fingers automatically flying to the tender little space where torso meets arm, where his own contract is never lost. She catches herself, keeping the fingers moving until they brush away an escaping curl, but as with almost everything she does, Charon sees it.

“Not really. Only I thought I did. I fessed up, and I've never seen him so scared. We turned the house upside down and found it in my other jacket. I...kept it closer after that.”

“What did the paper look like?”

While Dashwood strangles out a laugh, he does not move to show her, instead absentmindedly stroking the middle of his chest - as if the need to touch something under his sweater vest that might bring at least a sliver of comfort is just too much to bear. “It’s the damnedest thing. There isn’t a scribble left on it. I thought it was a joke at first, that he’d given me an blank piece of pre-war paper.”

 _‘Isn’t’._ Which means that he still carries it. A paper that binds one to another, words worn away by age. The admonishment ‘not to lose it’, the absolute panic when it is thought to be lost or destroyed. Charon hears these things and knows them to be the truth from a truthful man, but he cannot understand it.

Charon is the only of his kind and to say otherwise must simply be a lie.

“Did Argyle have a tattoo?” she asks, and though his train of thought stutters, Charon thinks he knows where she is going with this line of questioning.

Herbert looks wounded again. “Yes. A black dog. Right here,” he says quietly, touching the point of his own left shoulder. “He called it a ‘jackal’.”

“Anubis,” she says, tone reverent. “The Great Embalmer.”

“I don't understand-”

“It’s okay. So what happened? How did you get seperated?”

Herbert looks _anguished_ now, but because he is a storyteller by nature, he can do nothing except tell his story, one that had been bottled up for decades.

“The radio show, ‘Daring’ Dashwood. It’s a lie. All of it. But you probably already knew that.”

“I figured you might have taken some...creative license.”

“It made it easier. To let the world see him like I did, even if there were a few lies. You already know about Penelope Chase?”

“I’m betting she was a little different than the radio.”

“She was. Just a girl, looked hurt and sick. Said slavers were after her, so I thought I'd take her somewhere safe. Couldn’t think of anywhere safer than Rockopolis.”

“And she memorized the knock.”

“Penelope was smart. She healed up and left. Four days later, we were up to our ears in slavers. King Crag lost his shit, wanted to hand us over to the them, but they didn't just want us. And the ghouls were all but useless. Too used to hiding instead of fighting, I guess. We fought as best we could, but there were too many. They'd hurt Argyle pretty badly, he was having trouble moving.”

Dashwood shudders now, remembering old injuries, the sick-stomach distance of them being not his own making then somehow worse.

“The ghouls might have been shit at fighting, but they didn't go easy. One triggered a rockslide. I guess he figured it would be better to be crushed than be taken. The slavers were preoccupied then. So I put Argyle over my shoulder and started climbing up a cliff. It was either that or get cut down by slavers at the entrance. He...couldn’t hold on. I tried to grab him, but…”

His face is blank now, turned too far inwards to see anything else. The coin lies still in his open palm.

“It’s just so cold without him.”

She curls his wrinkled hand around the coin, soft and full of comfort, and he lets her.

“I’m sorry,” she says simply, but the way she says it, so sincere with tears thick in her throat, Charon knows she means at least that and probably a multitude of other things besides.

She means she wishes she could have been there, could have done something. But she was not, and she could not, and she has already given everything useful she had to give.

She stands to leave, to let him grieve over his coin in peace.

“Lucky?”

“Yeah?”

“You're a good person.”

She simply ducks her head and only as she turns away does she let the tears fall.

 

**********

 

“I’ve got a bad feeling,” she tells Charon, and he glances her way from his station leaning up against the wall in her Megaton home. Gone are the days of ease with her head in his lap, reading or just relaxing. His legs and back had complained at the change, but that was simply another weakness to excise like a cancer.

He waits for her to elaborate, but she does not. It is not particularly surprising.

She rarely speaks to him anymore.

He had thought he was well-versed in silence, that he could wield it like a weapon, but it turns out for all her babbling, his Mistress can, too.

Hers is hidden in busy-ness, disguised under a million little projects, camouflaged by tinkering. But underneath, it sprawls out low and unseen, running along the floors and up the walls thin and cold, a snap-freeze that kills everything it touches.

“About?” he finally asks because he while he is still busy building his armor, it is not complete yet.

“Roy.”

“Why?”

She looks up from her work, the finishing touches on a new kind of knife that is big enough to count as a sword. The blueprint proudly proclaims in large block letters impeccably spaced and darkly filled with pencil that it holds the key to forging a ‘Shishkebab’. The thought that while wildly impractical, it must be some fun to use, flits through his brain and he very nearly smiles.

Nearly.

“I dunno,” she says slowly, tapping her pencil. “I think he's rabid.”

Rabid. It is a surprisingly apt word to describe the metal state of Roy Phillips. A snapping, slavering sort of aggression, mad and all-encompassing, burning him out from the inside.

“Yes,” Charon agrees, shifting uncomfortably because the more he thinks about it, he wonders if Roy Phillips might be turning feral.

The same thought seems to run through his Mistress in a shiver, because she hops down from her too-tall stool and sets to frantically packing.

“Where are you going?” he asks, but he already knows.

She does not answer him, but instead packs up her Shishkebab, tank of flamer fuel and all.

“You wish I should pack, then?”

She ignores him in favor of packing, almost punching the med-kit down onto the top of her pack.

“Mistress?”

“Do what you want.”

It hits him hard, harder than he would have thought, right in the soft space above his sternum. She had said it to him before, when he had been in her bed, the heat of her stealing into his side as she gave him more freedom than he had ever had in all his known years. Her voice is cold now, but not uncaring. Charon does not think she has it in her to ever be that. It will kill her someday, that caring, but probably not today. Not yet.

She walks out the door without him.

He hurries upstairs to his room, retrieves his own perpetually ready pack, and falls in behind her.

It is, in his heart of hearts, what he wants after all.

 

**********

 

The moment that Charon truly understands his Mistress, truly sees the core of her, takes exactly five seconds.

One - the look of consternation when she walks into Tenpenny Tower to find no humans. Only ghouls.

Two - the grit of her teeth when a ghoul called Masters anxiously tells her ‘not to mind the smell’ coming from the basement.

Three - the balling of her fists when she discreetly visits the basement and finds exactly thirteen bodies, stripped of clothing and haphazardly stacked like kicked-over cords of wood.

Four - the broken sound she makes when she takes the coin necklace from around Dashwood’s rigored neck and settles it around her own.

Five - the burning light in her eyes - three parts rage and one part heart wrenching grief - as she massacres each and every doomed soul in the entire building.

No one is spared, no quarter is given. She is silent, and having judged and found each to be lacking, she ignores their pleas for mercy.

Masters is first, two bullets in the chest and one in the gut.

Three more nameless, unarmed ghouls are slaughtered with the Shishkebab, and then Bess. She backs away, babbling cries of ‘I didn't want to’, and ‘I’m so sorry’, but his Mistress has become deaf, a look of cold fury burning bright as she beats her to death with a spiked baseball bat.

Other ghouls have heard the report of rifles, the bone-crush of melee weapons, the cries of terror brought by the slice of knives, and they flee to hide where they might.

But she is methodical in her tidal wave of rage, sweeping the building with military precision, and each room is searched, each hiding place examined, and in turn, each ghoul dragged out and ended. Her face is spattered with blood, her hands smeared with it as she yanks a ghoul out of a closet and strangles them. Ghouls with guns are dropped with her own, and she stalks up to each and executes the stubborn and lingering with a shot to the head.

Charon follows silent, a golem protecting its charge, but not daring to interfere in her storm of blind rage.

At last she finds Roy Philips.

She sneaks up behind him as he stalks down a corridor and brains him with the butt of her rifle. He goes to his knees, momentarily stunned, and she easily rips his weapon from his limp hands and throws it with a clatter. Struggling to rise, he flounders on the ground as his brain attempts to clear a definite concussion.

His Mistress makes the first sound he has heard her make thus far - a laugh. It bubbles up from her chest and lets itself out, low and throaty, but is bitten off as she cants her hips like a spring, and kicks him full speed and vicious in the face.

He goes down with a sharp wail through loose teeth.

Charon expects her to finish him, to shoot him or slice him to ribbons or finish stomping his head in.

But she burrows in her pack, and for a moment, Charon wonders if she is going to stimpak him simply so she can beat him to death again. Instead, she pulls out a tank of flamer fuel, dousing the groaning lump of man as he writhes on the ground.

She backs away and waits, lets the fuel soak and into clothes and skin alike. Roy drunkenly sits up, spitting blood and teeth. After a few moments, he stiffens, smelling the fuel, feeling the tack of it on his skin. He looks at her and begs, but she is stone.

 _“And for you, s_ _o_ _n of_ _man,"_ she says solemn as prayer,  _"an e_ _n_ _d. For the winds of destruction shall blow upon the four corners of the earth and bring forth an age of utter devastation.”_

Charon can only stand there and watch as she flips open her lighter and tosses it. Roy _blooms_ into flame. She smiles, a sweet one, one so at odds with the sounds he makes. They finally stop, and while the sound of immolated man may have ceased, the terrible smell of burnt flesh takes its place.

 _“For if their name is not written in the book of life,”_ she recites softly, _“they shall be thrown into a lake of fire, where there shall be wailing and a great gnashing of teeth.”_

She stalks out of Tenpenny Tower, stepping over broken bodies as if they did not exist, boots squelching in the patches of blood that pool into the carpets like some kind of macabre puddle and she does not look back.

Charon understands that whatever monster he is, she is exactly the same.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Literary mentions:
> 
> Morning - Emily Dickinson
> 
> Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche


End file.
